IF I HAD KNOWN 



ABOUT 



GAmY 



IN 19 O 9 




Class I - ^- 

Copyii^ht^J" 



COPVKIGIIT DEPOSnV 



(4 



IF I HAD KNOWN" 



ABOUT 



GARY 



IN 1909 



By Will H. Moore 



CHICAGO 



BARNARD & MILLER PRINT 



1- b :> > 



Copyright, 1909, 



Will H. Moore, 
Chicago. 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two CoDies rtsceivcd 

JUN lU lUUi^ 

Copyrirm 



CLASS A AXc N 
' COHY B, 



TO THE TENS OF THOUSANDS OF WIDE-AWAKE, SELF- 
BETTERING PEOPLE INTERESTED IN THE SUBJECT 
OF THIS BOOK, IT IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED. 



FOR SOME OF THE DATA USED HEREIN, THE WRITER IS 
UNDER OBLIGATION TO SOME OF THE OFFICIALS OF 
THE STEEL COMPANY, BUT THEY ARE, TO NO EXTENT, 

SPONSORS FOR THE ISSUANCE OF THIS VOLUME. 




THK ELI'X'TRIC BUILDINCi (in May, 19I)S). 
The monster structure housing a quarter mile length of electric power engines. (See frontispiece.) 

"IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY." 

The true story of Gary is unbelievable. In the hope that the 
reader may, after reading this book, have some degree of belief in the 
facts, the writer here prepares the reader's faith by asserting that the 
one (now operating) steel mill of the United States Steel JJo. at Gary (not 
including the other vast plants there) is the largest enterprise of the human 
race in all history unless it he the Krupp Gun Works in Germany, which 
have been two generations coming into their prese?it pay roll of 45,000 
employes. That this steel mill's capacity is seven-eighths of the total 
capacity of all of the United States Steel Co.'s other mills in the United 
States put together. That at this mill steel can be produced at less cost 
than it has ever been produced or can be produced at any other mill now 
existing. That these things mean that if for any period through les- 
sened demand the United States Steel Co.'s production should fall off 
one-half, all of the steel they make will be made at Gary, and all their 
other steel mills in the country closed down until the demand increases. 

That these things, with the resulting, uninterrupted pay-roll of over 
a million dollars a week, and other existing conditions at Gary, further 
mean the sure, swift and marvelous oncoming there of a second Pitts- 
burgh — but smokeless, clean and attractive. 



"IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909' 



Anotlier mai-ked peculiarity of Gary 
is that few people know about it. It 
is so near Chicago that it can be 
reached in about an hour on any one 
of perhaps fifty trains a day at a cost 
of only a few dimes, and yet probably 
only one Chicago man in ten thousand 
knows about Gary and perhaps less 
than one hundred knowing at all fully 
about it. 

By a peculiar contradiction of hu- 
man action, Chicagoans would invest- 
igate and know more about Gary if it 
was a thousand miles away. It is so 
near that they say on Tuesday, "We 
will go Thui'sday, " and on Thursday, 
"We will go Saturday," and they have 
not gone. Scores are, however, now 
interesting themselves in real estate 
and business at Gary every week. 

In the first months of Gary's exist- 
ence the writer's attention was called 
to it by friends and clients, interested 
there, seeking his advice. He entered 
upon investigations to qualify himself 
to advise them, little thinking that it 
would lead him to years of exhaustive 
study of the most interesting subject 
in his experience. He was favored by 
having had thirty-five years of con- 
stant experience in real estate in all 
its phases. He found that among the 
many officials of various corporations 
that had most to do with the founding 
of Gary, he had many personal ac- 
quaintances willing to favor him with 
valuable information, not generally 
given. 

He has had from the start a growing 
conviction that Gary in its industrial 
and municipal development and growth 
is the phenomenon of the age. In 
spite of increasing selling values of 
real estate and his sharp lookout for 
the development of boom conditions, he 
has remained convinced that no such 
condition exists or has existed. 

He became so thoroughly posted, so 
full of tlie subject, and found that so 



many, even in Chicago, were so 
astounded and interested in hearing 
the facts, that he was easily persuaded 
by his friends to the course he is now 
taking. Though having much invested 
at Gary, he has nothing there that is 
for sale. 

THE GARY OP THE PRESENT. 

The reader will quickly realize that 
in this book the writer aspires to no 
literary reputation. Whenever he 
could give the reader something better 
from others he has done it, and if his 
work is partly a compilation, the 
writer is satisfied so long as it is doing 
the best thing for the reader. 

The Gary situation, as now assured, 
is a steel mill built and owned by a 
corporation known as the Indiana Steel 
Company, which is one of the sub- 
ordinate companies of the great United 
States Steel Company. 

Also the Steel Company's town site, 
about a mile wide north and south, and 
about two miles wide east and west. 

Also the Steel Company's, about ten 
thousand acres of land (see map), out 
of which space has been provided and 
purchased for the American Car and 
Foundry Company, of over two hun- 
dred acres ; also for the American 
Bridge Company of about the same 
amount; also about the same amount 
for the American Steel and Wire Com- 
pany and recently the Steel Company 
has sold of its holdings 130 acres for 
a site for the new mills of the Amer- 
ican Locomotive Works. The extent 
of these separate works and the forces 
they will employ is set forth later. 

The writer hopes that the reader will 
feel enough compensated for buying 
and reading this book to pardon a page 
or two, somewhere herein, about the 
writer's personal touch with the sub- 
ject, in which some of the readers may 
be interested. 



THE GARY OF THE PRESENT 



In the year 1907 the author of this 
book wrote as follows : 

"I hereby submit a statement of facts that 
will surprise and interest you. It is abovit 
the wonderful — amazing conditions, present 
and prospective, at Gary, Ind. — a business 
enterprise unequaled in combined size, speed 
and permanency in the world's history. 

I have no real estate to sell there and rep- 
resent no one that has, but I want to be 
widely known as one well informed about 
Gary and vicinity, and whose advice is of 
value. 

Thousands of men in and about Chicago are 
investing largely in Seattle, Los Angeles, 
etc., not knowing that right here at home, at 
a location the corporate limits of which are 
only five miles from the corporate limits of 
Chicago, are combined investment and specu- 
lative probabilities svirpassing probably any 
that ever existed in the United States. 

The United States Steel Company, at a cost 
of over six million dollars, has quietly ac- 
quired for permanent ownership and use 
about 8,000 acres of land fronting on the 
Southern shore of Lake Michigan for about 
nine miles and extending back over a mile 
and a half. 

On this land the company is well started 
in the outlay of over $100,000,000 for mod- 
ern, permanent buildings for many of its nu- 
merous constituent companies, and in the last 
few months many thousands of men have been 
at work and millions of money expended in 
preparing topography of sites, extensive 
cement foundations, cement-constructed har- 
bor surroundings, canals, sewers, docks, rail- 
ways and getting under roof numerous im- 
mense buildings (at a reported cost of over 
$10,000,000) for the Indiana Steel Company, 
which will handle 5,000,000 tons of ore a year 
and 2,500,000 tons of steel. Of the steel rails 
alone the product will be 900,000 tons a year. 
The portion of this one plant equipped for the 
manufacture of rails will cost $2,500,000. 

The extensive production at Indiana Harbor, 
west of Gary, is from seven furnaces; the 
Indiana Steel Company alone is building at 
Gary one hundred furnaces. 

Every advance known to science and iu- 
dvistry will have its mark on these steel mills, 
destined to soon be the most extensive in the 
world in Ihe manufacture of steel and the 
making of everything in which steel is the 
prime factor. The machinery in the works 
is very largely to be operated by electricity. 

The harbor slip for the Company's lake 
fleets, with their cargoes, is being completed 
a mile long and will have a water depth of 
twenty-five feet and will be two hundred and 
fifty feet in width. The contract for the 
harbor and docks alone is $1,500,000. 



a capacity suflicient for the needs of the 
entire works, is the only one so equipijed in 
the Chicago district. Its location is east of 
the Indiana Steel Company's plant. 

This is not to be a smoky city; modern 
methods enabling the extraction from the 
smoke of all gases and fumes, which are used 
again as fuel, the residue being practically 
invisible. 

The ore comes from the company's north- 
ern mines, in the company's boats, and is un- 
loaded at the company's extensive docks at a 
cost of only a few cents a ton, and carried to 
any and all parts of the works as desired. 

This immense plant is only one of a group 
of very large manufacturing plants to be 
rapidly housed and provided with all modern 
facilities. Among these are the American 
Car and Foundry Company, which at Gary 
alone will have a capacity of about 40,000 
finished railroad cars annually, or one com- 
pleted ear every six minutes, employing thou- 
sands of men. 

This company's plant will occupy two hun- 
dred and twenty acres immediately west of 
the space occupied by the Indiana Steel Com- 
pany and farther west on the Steel Company's 
premises, is to be built the plant of the colos- 
sal American Bridge Company, and adjoining 
it on the west is the location of the American 
Steel and Wire Company, and next is the 
Steel Company's Universal Portland Cement 
plant. They produce seventeen thousand bar- 
rels of cement daily. 

These companies are expected to give em- 
ployment to something like 50,000 workmen, 
which is said to mean a population of over 
150,000, besides the many thousands employed 
by numerous adjoining independent com- 
panies (many of which use large quantities 
of the Steel Company's finished products), 
and other thousands of trades people, railroad 
operatives and the army of mechanics that 
are building these unparalleled works and 
this wonderful new city — to be larger than 
Indianapolis, Milwaukee or Seattle, and built 
in the shortest time in which any city of its 
size was ever built so largely and permanently 
of stone, brick and iron. 

There are even now many miles of sewers, 
an extended water supply system already in 
use, and miles of substantially paved streets 
and wide cement sidewalks. 

The average natural ground level of the 
Steel Compan3''s holdings, and thousands of 
acres of adjacent property, is about fourteen 
feet above the lake level, which is fully as 
high as at Oakland, Kenwood or Hyde Park, 
in Chicago. 

Electric lines enabling the workmen to re- 
side some miles from the works are so certain 
that a livelj' fight is on as to who shall have 
the franchises. 



The company 's extensive coking plant, with The residence section is being converted 



10 



"IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909" 



from stretcnes of sand to black dirt and ela.y 
sub-soil for grass and trees. The Steel Com- 
pany's men in charge of this are said to have 
reported this soil alone would cost one million 
dollars and were told to go ahead. One con- 
struction company has contracts for five mil- 
lion dollars' worth of residences, costing from 
$2,000 to $15,000. On the business . streets 
only brick and stone can be used, and fire 
ordinances are in force. City buildings, school 
buildings, churches, clubs and public parks 
are all being provided for. 



that it will about double the Steel Company's 
production for the entire United States. 

June 1st of this year ended the Steel Com- 
pany 's most prosperous year, and yet they 
then reported on hand unfilled orders for 
7,603,878 tons, being nearly a million tons 
more than on June 1, 1906; and despite the 
very large output for June and July of this 
year, the unfilled orders are reported at over 
seven million tons. 

Within the last two years the Vanderbilt 




JACKSON STREET NORTH FROM EIGHTH .\VENUE_IN NOVE.MBER, 1908. 



Broadway, extending from one of the prin- 
cipal entrances to the works, over two miles 
south, is one hundred feet wide, with thirty- 
foot alleys, and the paving and sidewalks are 
not surpassed in Chicago. All underground 
pipes, etc., are in the alleys. For the most 
part, this development is being paid for by 
the Steel Company through its subordinate 
Land Company and the cost has been added 
to the price of lots. 

The water system, pumping works, sewer- 
age, gas and electric light plants start with 
a capacity for a population of three hundred 
thousand people. 

The company, at large expense, is straight- 
ening and expanding the ' ' Grand Calumet ' ' 
river, and it is expected that soon it will be 
a ship canal, extending possibly to the Gulf. 
This river is within the company's holdings 
for about six miles. This location is geograph- 
ically the "neck of the hour glass" through 
which must pass most of the rail traffic be- 
tween the great West and the East. 

The vastness of this industrial plant is such 



roads have purchased at Gary, wholly for local 
railroad purposes, over 700 acres of laud and 
the other railroads passing through the vicin- 
ity have bought nearly as much. These pur- 
chases are exclusive of what land has been 
bought for expanded rights-of-way, and the 
development and equipment of them alone rep- 
resent a larger investment than that of some 
entire manufacturing towns. I am reliably 
informed that in the Gary vicinity the local 
railroad lines, side tracks, etc., exclusive of 
vast freight yards, are being increased 225 
miles. 

The railroads traversing this locality include 
the trunk lines of the Baltimore & Ohio, the 
Lake Shore, the Pennsylvania Lines, the Mich- 
igan Southern, the Wabash, and also the In- 
diana Harbor road, Chicago, Lake Shore & 
Eastern, Indiana Harbor Belt Line, Gary & 
Western, Chicago & Calumet Terminal, and the 
Elgin, Joliet & Eastern (the Chicago outer 
belt line). 

The Steel Company is in no degree seeking 
to reap the benefits of advancing values in the 



THE GARY OF THE PRESENT 



11 



real estate caused by their operations. The}' 
have no real estate to sell except lots in their 
town plat within the limits of the town of 
Gary for a prompt improvement of a stipu- 
lated use and kind, and withhold the deed 
until it IS done and the property paid for. 

The company is stimulating the building 
by outsider of houses for the great army of 
employes, and say they will build only as they 
must. About one thousand houses, manj' of 
them for the higher salaried employes, are 
being completed. They sell houses to their 
employes only. The above only applies to 
the company's property. All other Gary prop- 
erty is sold as elsewhere. 

There is not, and will not be, any paternal- 
ism, or corporate dominance of the affairs of 
the city corporation of Gary, as the Steel Com- 
pany has only one representative on the 
Board of Trustees. 

The company does, however, wisely domi- 
nate the management and development of 
their town site, and ssem in all things to be 
surely effecting their evident intention to 
make Gary in attractiveness to the eye and 
enjoyment of the residents there the model 
industrial city of the world. With their own 
millions they are paving many miles of street, 
putting in twenty-two inch iron water mains, 
nine-foot sewers, cement sidewalks, an ex- 
tensive and expensive pure water supply, and 
condition all of their lot sale contracts so that 
nothing but good residences and business 
blocks can be built, requiring the improve- 
ments to be completed within an agreed time 
and withholding the deeds until it is done. 

The owner of about fifty acres nearly a 
mile south of the Steel Company's land 
bought it less than one year ago at $363 per 
acre and has since refused (wisely, I think,) 
$550 per acre for it. 

Thirty-seven acres located about two miles 
from the main entrance to the Steel Com- 
pany's works was bought within two years 
for $50 per acre, and has since been resold, 
first at $450 an acre and again at $500 per 
acre. 

Some fifteen j^ears ago a part of this land 
was bought by a syndicate of Chicago packers 
and it was given out that new stock yards 
were to be built. It reallj' was bought to 
force an issue with the management of the 
Chicago Stock Yards, and succeeded. There 
is, and has been, an extended impression that 
a boom had existed and collapsed. The facts 
are, the packers resold their land to the 
United States Steel Company for about $1,350 
an acre, being several times what they paid 
for it, and they never built anything on it. 

There are, of course, scores of similar illus- 
trations of increasing values, and yet anyone 



of intelligence, after going there, and consid- 
ering the foregoing statements, can see that 
boom conditions do not exist, and that the 
causes for increasing values are keeping, and 
are likely to keep, in the lead, and that future 
advances, rapid as they will be, will continue 
to be along the lines of conservative, perma- 
nent values. TTie possible buyer should not 
hold back an hour on any thought that a 
' ' boom' ' has matured and prices are high. 

The average business man, inclined to in- 
vest in Gary property, will need to do so 
largely on the advice of someone who has a 
right to his confidence and who has, with 
unusual facilities, studied the svibject both in 
its immensity and in its details. 

This requires experience, mouths, and 
money. The subject is vast and interesting. 
There are so many things that affect the pres- 
ent and probable future values (some' of them 
difficult to learn, some of them confidential.) 

Studying a map at home without much other 
information is useless; one's first few visits 
to Gary are merely bewildering and astound- 
ing. From the bridge across the ' ' Grand Calu- 
met' ' at the head of Broadway, the site of the 
steel mills resembles Jackson Park, the winter 
before the opening of the World's Fair, 

It is impossible within a week, except 
through advice, to learn much of significance, 
and at the end of a week of deliberation and 
investigation, selling prices have increased, or 
the property being considered has been sold. 

As quickly as I comprehended the situation 
I decided to represent buyers rather than sell- 
ers, confining myself to work on these lines for 
possible buyers who know me, and whose con- 
fidence I have or secure. Sellers interests are 
looked after by scores of keen, well posted 
agents, who, however honorable, are interested 
in their side of the business only. Buyers need 
intelligent advice from one not representing 
sellers. If I did not feel sincerely certain that 
I could save or make buyers much more tnan 
my services cost them, I would not be in it. 

I advise the prompt purchase of well lo- 
cated acres at the right price, either in five or 
ten-acre tracts, individually, or by a syndi- 
cate of friends who can agree on a reselling 
price. Advice as to lots is equally needed. 

There is little trouble as to titles, as sell- 
ers usually furnish title guarantees by the 
Chicago Title and Trust C'ompanj', but a 
buj'er should have legal guidance, and there 
are good lawyers in Gary. 

WILL H. MOOBE, 
Eoom 839, 304 Dearborn St., Chicago. 
Phone Central 881. 

Chicago, Sept. 15, 1907. 



12 



"IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909' 




FOUNDATIONS FOR •■STO\ Ko ' iNo.^. 6 ANU B. 

The above striking picture of construction at the mills shows the foundations of stoves Nos. 5 and 6, near the ore 
i alongside the harbor. Stoves are always built in sets of fours. The round black foundations are steel T-rails 
ed close together in order to reinforce the concrete which will continue the construction. In the iDackground are 



pla „ - -- - 

the two open-hearth furnace buildings, and the first section of the electricity building. 



The toregoing was not printed until 
now, having been prepared for only 
those known to Avant it, being friends 
of the writer's and their friends. The 
very considerable business resulting 
from it has proven satisfactory to all 
concerned. In one slightly outlying 
locality alone in which the writer was 
among the first to predict advancing 
values, he has purchased for clients 
several acre tracts that since, measured 
by actual offers, have more than dou- 
bled in value. Some of his purchases 
have been made for investing clients 
who have never yet seen the property, 
having given him the money for the 
first payment with instructions to buy 
something he thought good. Another, 
an entire stranger at first, was, by mu- 
tual friends, induced to rely wholly 
and exclusively on the writer's advice 
and assistance, through months of 
tedious but successful negotiations for 
a loM^ price. His investment has dou- 
bled in less than a year, and will bring 



him thousands more. To these people, 
and scores of others, including banks, 
the writer is in position to refer, after 
a personal meeting or correspondence. 
Others have come direct from home to 
the writer's office, arranged for and 
had his advice, and concluded pur- 
chases alone. 

For information of those who may 
come to my Chicago office expecting to 
advise with me about Gary investments, 
I should say that whether I am here or 
not, one of my assistants will arrange 
and receive pay for an appointment for 
some hour, that day or the next. This 
does not api^ly to my personal friends 
who would invest through me, if at 
all. If you advise with me it is bet- 
ter to do so before talking real estate 
with any seller or seller's agent. After 
an interview, I generally find myself in 
position to either take such a client to 
Gary, or send him with one of my well- 
posted assistants, without further 
charge. 



WHAT HAS BEEN DONE 



13 



My having nothing for sale at Gary 
and its being Imown that scores of 
probable buyers come to see me, causes 
many owners of Gary property to let 
me know what they have for sale, their 
price, etc. 

Where the prices are, in my judg- 
inent, right, my client is given the 
benefit of only such of these properties 
as come within the kind he wants to 
investigate. Then if he wants me to 
negotiate a purchase, we can arrange 
that. 

In most cases we can arrange where- 
by, fairly to you, any charge for my 
services in negotiating and buying, 
will be paid by the seller, which is 
quite customary. In such case, the fee 
paid is returned. (See last page.) 

This is all in these pages about the 
writer and his business. He does not 
claim to be exclusively well informed 
or reliable. Among those operating in 
Gary real estate are scores of honor- 
able, well-informed men, any of whom 
can freely refer to the writer and to 
any of whom he is proud to refer. 
What exceptions there are the writer 
declines to mention or be asked about. 



WHAT HAS BEEN DONE. 

Since the foregoing letter of Septem- 
ber 15, 1907, was written, among many 
other things of material and permanent 
significance that have come into exist- 
ence, are the following : 



The big steel mill has been completed 
to such an extent that they are already 
making steel rails, with a limited force, 
of course, at first. 



The great harbor slip has been com- 
pleted, and its $800,000 "turning 
basin" for the ore boats to turn around 
in is in course of construction. 



The Steel Company has brought 
from their own northern iron mines, 
Avith their OAvn fleet of boats, into their 
own harbor, and by their wonderful 
unloading devices, put into some of 
their immense ore bins (each bin as 
large as two city blocks) 840,000 tons 
of iron ore. 

All of the other millions of dollars 
worth of buildings and their equip- 
ment, including blast furnaces, gas 
conservers, a row of immense gas en- 
gines a quarter of a mile long, open 
hearth furnaces, etc., to complete what 
they call the "first unit" of their im- 
mense production plant have been 
built. 



They have removed temporary build- 
ings and prepared a site of nearly 
forty acres for the buildings and 
grounds of a $200,300 hospital. 



They have brought shiploads of 
stone and timbers to construct at the 
mouth of their harbor slip, the largest 
and finest break-water on the Great 
Lakes. 

They have completed the water tun- 
nel under the waters of Lake Michigan 
for over a mile to a point where they 
have constructed an in-take crib and 
in one of the city parks, have prac- 
tically completed a water tower and 
about completed the pumping station, 
which provides a supply of pure water 
sufficient for a population of 300,000 
people. 

They have added to their holdings 
of land provided for industrial plants 
nearly 2,000 acres. They have com- 
pleted the "Kirk Switch Yards," 
which is probably the largest system 
of switching and freight tracks at any 



14 



"IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909" 



one spot on the Globe, so large that it 
requires a little town of its own to ac- 
commodate those who work there. 




Height from toiintl itinn io tiji ot roof, 160 feet, diame- 
ter 41 feet , circumference at base 125 feet; capacity of 
water tank, 300,000 gallons. 

Scores of miles of new railroads now 
grid-iron the extensive industrial tract 
of the company. Most of these roads 
are elevated. The main trunk lines of 
the Lake Shore and Baltimore & Ohio 



railroads have been, for a distance of 
about ten miles, picked up and moved 
to the south to accommodate the Steel 
Companj^'s building plans. Two outer 
belt lines around Chicago have been 
brought into Gary and connected with 
the net work of tracks that run to all 
of the mills and will run to, and 
through, all of the future mills. 

Tlie site of the American Car and 
Foundrj' Company is in the hands of 
the engineers and surveyors, who are 
providing the data for the iiguring of 
contractors to construct the buildings, 
which it is said will cover almost en- 
tirely 212 acres and furnish employ- 
ment for over 15,000 men, and have a 
capacity for 200 steel cars daily. This 
plant will be built this year. 

The great American Ijoconiotive 
Works have been provided with, and 
have bought, 130 "acres of the Steel 
Company's land and are preparing to 
at once construct on it larger works 
than any they now have, which will 
employ many additional thousands. 
Tlie permanent plans of the American 
Bridge Company and the American 
Steel and Wire Company are reliably 
stated to be only in abeyance for a 
short time, and the construction of nu- 
merous new steam railroads to and 
into the proposed sites of these com- 
panies, confirm all prospects. These 
also are companies among those which 
employ the most thousands of skilled 
workmen of any in the world. 

The Town or the City of Gary has 
gone ahead in keeping beyond all be- 
lievable predictions. The daytime pop- 
ulation of Gary and vicinity has been 
from the start, and still is, perhaps 
three times its night population. This 
is due, first, because the working popu- 
lation there have, up to now, been 



WHAT HAS BEEN DONE 



15 



largely on eoiistruetion and do not 
feel sure enough of permanent employ- 
ment to establish homes at Gary, and, 
second, because there are no habita- 
tions at Gary that can be rented. 
Hence these workmen have been com- 
ing and going by thousands on scores 
of trains, which permits them to live 
at Whiting, Indiana Harbor, Ham- 
mond, South Chicago, Engiewood, Chi- 
cago, etc. W^hile these thousands and 
other thousands will be employed in 
similar construction on work at Gary 
for years, the Steel Company prefers 
to confine itself to providing perma- 
nent homes for its own coming thou- 
sands of steel workers. As soon as 
private capital and enterprise realize 
the great demand for homes by ten- 
ants, thousands of these workmen on 
construction can and will also become 
residents of Gary. The first people 
who reside in or about Gary (and pos- 
sibly the only ones) that can be rea- 
sonably "'expected^"to" cease ' living " at 
Gary, are the unskilled ; — people mak- 
ing up what is known as common la- 
bor. Many of these, as in all such 
cases, have now, scattered throughout 
the outlying region of the Town of 
Gary, homes that do the community 
little good, and which will be torn 
down. In fact, the Steel Company, 
every month, is requiring the destruc- 
tion of scores of these temporary build- 
ings, that they permitted to be located 
on their ground for the sake of get- 
ting the men's labor. 



the selling values of real estate, than 
even the great mills. While it is true, 
these mifls are the GREAT CAUSE, 
they are infinitely harder to realize the 
significance of than the town itself 
with its great increase in building and 
population, because the possible in- 
vestor, coming to Gary, can see the 
town and comprehend the increasing 
population and extensive building 
more than he can the mills which he 
is not permitted to get into or see and 
which he could not comprehend if he 
did see, unless they were in full blast, 
and they are only starting. 



The electric street car lines which 
early obtained their franchises and 
were waiting the income of popula- 
tion, are now in actual running opera- 
tion, with large modern cars, good, 
frequent service, and usual city fares. 
The quick and inexpensive travel com- 
munication between Gary and Chicago 
amounted a year ago to about fifty 
trains dailj^, but even this has been 
largely expanded both by new steam 
and electric lines, and by more trains. 
Some of this expansion and improve- 
ment has much increased the accessi- 
bility and future prospects of some 
very choice outlying land around Gary 
Avhere a purchaser of acres can profit- 
ably subdivide them into desirable 
residence conditions for the very many 
who prefer to live away from the 
activities of the city. 



So while the present population of 
Gary is about 15,000 people, the great 
growth and improvement in population 
and in average character . of the citi- 
zens and the grade of homes they will 
occupy, are, with the opening of the 
great mills just at hand, and it is 
morally certain that this great incom- 
ing increase of population during the 
present year, will do more to advance 



The Illinois Central Railroad has 
just emerged victoriously from a long 
and persistent fight to extend its 
freight and passenger service over a 
branch line into Gary. In extending 
this branch (which is called the Ken- 
sington & Eastern) from near Pullman 
on their main line to the Indiana State 
line, they run through the Third and 
Eighth wards of Chicago, and in the 



16 



IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909" 



final adjustment with the Chicago City 
Coimeil, they elevated the entire 
branch and put in street crossing via- 
ducts. 



through extensive and ample drainage 
and nuiuy Avise and prudent ordi- 
nances. Conditions to enforce good 
order, lawful conduct, and safety to 




Tracks over subway and the north end of Broadway i 

The Chicago, Lake Shore & South 
Bend road now runs trains from the 
Illinois Central city depot into Gary 
every forty minutes with numerous lo- 
cal stations in the Gary vicinity. 




side the woiks, shewing seme of the auxihary shops. 

life and property, have been amply 
provided, as well as protection against 
fire, etc. The spirit and purpose of 
tlie Steel Company's plans are not 
more evident in anything than in the 
matter of schools. In addition to some 
fourteen modest temporary school 
houses scattered about the town, one 
•i^60,000 permanent school house is 
completed and in use, and the con- 
struction of the Emerson Public School 
is well under way. This building, 
which will cost approximately a quar- 
ter of a million dollars, is probably not 
surpassed in New York or Chicago. 



CITY OFFICIALS INSPECTING ONE OF GARY'S 
SEWERS. 

In addition to expensive provisions 
for pure Avater, everything that money 
and good sense can do has been done to 
make the locality one of the healthiest. 



Tiiere has also been remarkable and 
satisfactory growth from the stand- 
point of most present or future resi- 
dents of Gary in organizations that 
have to do Avith the religious and so- 
cial sides of city residence and the or- 



WHAT IS BEING DONE 



17 



ganizations that, through public spirit, 
make for the public welfare of the 
community. Almost every religious 
denomiuation that has an organized 
church society in Chicago has one in 
Gary. Many of them have built, or 
are building, large, fine church edi- 
fices. About all of the lodges, secret 
societies, fraternal orders, etc., have 
established branches Avith the usual 
meeting places at Gai-y. The college 
men have a University Club of nearly 
one hundred members. The lawyers 
have a Bar Association. The real es- 
tate men have a Real Estate Board. 
The doctors have a jMedical Society. 
and the general welfare of the com- 
munity is forcefully looked after by a 
strong Commercial Club representing 
among its active members, almost 
every branch of business or employ- 
ment iu the city. 




PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, GARY. 

WHAT IS BEING DONE. 

Broadway, the central business thor- 
oughfare, has been legally extended 
and widened to 100 feet in width for 
another two miles and about $50,000 
has been appropriated for a new 
bridge over the Little Calumet River. 
Broadway has been improved by addi- 



tional brick and stone substantial 
business blocks until almost solidly 
built up. At one time during the fall 
of the year 1908, 1,000 feet of Broad- 
way frontage were being so improved 
at one time. Three banks, occupying 
their own fine buildings, are doing 
business. 




GARY STATE BANK, BROADWAY. 

The Gary & Western steam Rail- 
road, mostly elevated, has been com- 
pleted by the Vanderbilt interests, and 
is designed largely for Chicago and 
Gary passenger service with local sta- 
tions about a mile apart in the Gary 
district, adding very largely to the 
number of Gary-Chicago trains. The 
Chicago, Lake Shore & Eastern road's 
repair shops, employing something like 
2,000 men, are being comj^leted in 
Gary. 

The postofilice business of Gary has 
grown so rajjidly that the office has 
been jumped from a fourth-class to a 
second-class office, and free delivery 
by carriers has been ordered by the 
Postoffiee Department. This rapidity 
in development and advance in the 
rank of the office has no jjarallel in the 
history of the Department. 

The social and moral phases have de- 
veloped to a gratifying extent. Church 
buildings and school buildings have 



18 



"IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909" 



multiplied and saloons and saloon li- 
censes have been wholly wiped out. 

The wonderful subject of Gary has 
commenced to attract attention from 
four continents. Magazines and news- 
papers throughout this country and 
Europe are writing it up generally or 
on specific sub.iects. 



CIVIC LIFE AND FORCE OF GARY. 

Lastly, and far from the least, is the 
fact that the citizens of Gary have de- 
veloped and manifested great civic in- 
terest. In and outside of the alert and 
earnest Gary Commercial Club is the 
old civic pride, wisdom and energy 



1^1 ^X/^'^'^ 



.j» j^f?i>^' 



rA 




*.'r 






m m^ M w^ 



r^r^ 




In, 



N^-' 



FIRST NATIONAL BANK. 



The Steel Company has taken out of 
the market all of their remaining busi- 
ness lots on Broadway and Fifth ave- 
nue, the two business streets in their 
town plat. The reason given for this 
shows the wisdom, spirit and intent of 
the Steel Company in relation to the 
town and the prosperity of its busi- 
ness men. They say that they have 
sold business lots on a basis that com- 
pelled the owner to at once improve 
them with business properties, and 
they propose to protect them in secur- 
ing successful tenants and sure rentals 
as against overbuilding. 



that in Chicago, and other cities, laid 
surely the foundations for great mu- 
nicipal results. They have not been 
content to wait supinely on the Steel 
Company's doings or its millions. As 
has been written : 

"The citizenship of Gary is well in- 
formed and alert. It has already 
shown a disposition to watch care- 
fully its i)ublic interests. Rightly or 
wronglj'', it has, on occasion, taken is- 
sue with the controlling industry of 
the place. Yet it is a tribute to Amer- 
ican fair-mindedness that there re- 
mains on both sides — citizens and com- 



CIVIC LIFE AND FORCE OF GARY 



19 



pany — a good spirit of working to- 
gether. It is hard to find a soul who 
fails to 'point with pride' at the indus- 
trial genius which has found expres- 
sion in the place, and every business 
man believes enthusiastically in the 
city's future." 



No town that talks of ' ' yesterday, ' ' 

Garyland, my Garyland. 
But straig'ht ahead you take your way, 

Garyland, my Gsryland. 
And you, pre-eminently grand 
Through all the centuries shall stand, 
Because your builders have the sand, 
Garvland, my Garyland. 




Often when these enthusiastic, force- 
ful people come togetlaer in conferences 
or at banquet, their ever existing home 
city spirit finds expression in singing 
the following, written for the Gary 
Commercial Club, by Wilbur D. Nes- 
bit, the widely known Chicago poet 
and writer: 



three, four or five stories high. 



So here we drink a brimming glass, 
Garyland, my Garyland. 

To you whose glory ne 'er shall pass, 
Garyland, my Garyland. 

I'he desert blossoms as the rose, 

And that's the way that Gary grows; 

I 'm mighty happy that I chose 
Garyland, my Garyland. 



We lift a song in praise of thee, 

Garyland, mj' Garyland. 
We know what a great spot you'll be. 

Garyland, my Garyland. 
The wheels of progress all will hum, 
And Gary will be going some 
Through all the splendid years to come, 

Garyland, my Garyland. 



Not the least among these vital, ever 
persistent forces, is the Gary Tribune, 
now a widely read daily, and as able 
and interesting as any local newspaper 
the writer has ever seen in any city of 
100,000 people. 



20 



"IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909" 



SOME QUESTIONS DISCUSSED. 

It is natural for a man contemplat- 
ing an investment, the profits on which 
depend to any degree on future de- 
velopments, to question its sureness. 
In the Gary proposition the writer 
thinks of but three questions that 
seem reasonable : 

1. Is Gary going to be a large city? 

2. Probably how soon ? 

3. May not growth in real estate 
values be hindered or reversed by oc- 
casional "shutting down" the works 
through slack demand for their pro- 
duction ? 



prices on their town lots and all their 
actions pertaining to real estate, in 
or about Gary, show that they are not 
seeking or expecting to make money 
by buying and selling real estate, the 
reader must remember that neither the 
Steel Company nor its predecessors 
have ever at any point sought to make 
money out of real estate. 

If the reader, after finishing this 
book will thoughtfully consider, he 
must admit that if the Steel Company 
expected that the population of Gary 
would only be 40,000 or 50,000 people, 
they never would have expended their 
millions as thev have to create even 




GARY HOTEL- 

As to the first, it will be conceded 
that the officials of the Steel Company 
come very near knowing the answer. 
As is well known, such officials do very 
little talking and give out little ad- 
vance information, so we must read 
their knowledge by their actions. 
While the Steel Company's selling 



-ONE OF FIVE. 

present conditions at Gary, including 
water, seAverage. etc., for a 300,000 
population, which population the 
writer believes to be certain. 

As to the second question, "When," 
it may be safely answered, within the 
fewest years such a development ever 
occurred in the history of the world. 



SOME QUESTKINS DISCUSSED 



21 



It is not alone the probable 50,000 
steel workers who are now sure to 
come this year and next, but the tens 
of thousands of merchants, trades peo- 
ple, professional men, building me- 
chanics, etc., etc., that are alwaj^s con- 
nected with, and essential to, a large 
industrial city, and every city. When 
you come to think that by the gen- 
erally accepted basis of count, 50,000 
heads of families means 200,000 people, 
and that there must be probably 25,000 
other citizens, mostly heads of fami- 
lies, you get the problem and the pros- 
pects. 

It may be thought that Gary is too 
near to Chicago to ever be a large city, 
and yet we nuist remember that in the 
shadow of Boston, are such large in- 
dustrial cities as Lynn (90,000), 
Taunton (40,000), and AVorcester 
(140,000), and that near at hand to 
New York City, are Jersey City (250,- 
000), Newark (290,000), Trenton (90,- 
000), Paterson (130,000). That the 
substantial City of Youngstown (55,- 
000) has grown up near Cleveland ; 
Erie (05,000) near to Buffalo; Alle- 
gheny City (160,000) near to Pitts- 
burg, and that within an hour's ride of 
Philadelphia have grown up the hun- 
dred thousand populated towns of 
Reading, Trenton, AVilmington, Cam- 
den, etc., and that the above list does 
not include scores of cities of 30,000 
or 40,000 people that almost adjoin 
each of some one of our largest cities. 

The third question is practical and 
met largely, of course, by the question 



as to whether or not the Gary mill can 
make steel, etc., materially cheaper 
than any titlier mill or mills of the 
Steel Company, or others, throughout 
the country. Tlie writer here again 
asserts that the big new mills at Gary 
Avill not only be of capacity to make 
one-half of all of the United States 
Steel Company's production, but can 
make it at so much less cost that if 
the Steel Company's orders ever fall 
off one-lialf, that all of the steel made 
will be produced at Gary and all other 
mills closed down until the demand in- 
creases. 

This is an interesting and startling 
statement, but after the reader gets 
the facts and considers that the Steel 
Company have never in their history 
made steel except on orders, and where 
they can make it the cheaiaest and have 
never run any mill for the purpose of 
keeping the workmen in any town or 
locality at work, he must concede that 
the answer to question three tiirns on 
whether or not the Gary mills can 
make steel much cheaper than the com- 
pany can elsewhere make it. I am 
justified in here inserting the most able 
article on that subject that I have ever 
seen. 

It is also of great interest on the 
general Gary question. It was pub- 
lished by one of our most valued maga- 
zines, to wit : ' ' System, ' ' and was 
written early in the present year by 
one" of its able editorial staff, Mr. Dan- 
iel Vincent Casev. 



IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909' 




THE RAIL MILL IN NOVEMBER, 1908. 
The line of stacks at the right mark the furnaces or "soaking pits" in which the steel ingots are heated before 
introduction to the first train of rolls in the rail mills. Notice the lofty towers which carry the transmission cables 
furnishing power to the machinery of the various mills and furnaces of the great plant. 

The Sum of a Thousand Short Cuts. 



Hoiv the economies, the time-saving devices of a hundred plants have been 

concentrated in the luorld's greatest plant at Gary which contains 

cost-cutting and result-bringing suggestions for every business. 

A stereopticon image magnifying a hundred fold the problem- 
details facing every business man — 

That is Gary. 

Because of its magnitude — the world challenging job of creating 
a new city, a deep-sea harbor, industry's biggest steel mill — Gary has 
held the attention of four continents since 1906 ; interest redoubled with 
the ''blowing in" of its first furnace a few days ago. 

Size, however, is its smallest quality. To the business man its im- 
perative claims are its efficiency, economy, speed. It is the shrine of the 
short cut — a composite of the best in power, in production, in saving. 

It is a hundred-million-dollar lesson in the science of making and 
selling — a demonstration in steel and concrete of the parts foresight, 
strategy and exact knowledge should play in every business — a public 
test of the principles you can profitably apply in your factory, your 
office, your store, however great or small. 



THE SUM OF A THOUSAND SHORT CUTS 



23 



GARY is a misnomer. The new steel 
capital on the southern lip of Lake 
Michigan whose first blast furnaces 
spouted golden metal the other day, 
should have been christened Economy, 
Indiana. For economy is the inspira- 
tion and the genius of the place. Lo- 
cation, size, arrangement, equipment, 
and every great and lesser detail of the 
whole huge plant serve that one master 
purpose — saving. Saving of materials, 
time and labor; conserving of energy; 
elimination of wastes. The problem 
of producing more steel and cheaper 
steel than any other mill on earth has 
been worked out with the confident 
foresight of expei'ience and the cer- 
tainty of mathematics. Some $42,- 
000,000 have been poured out on the 
Indiana barrens in a little more than 
two years. This to complete the first 
unit of production, to create a harbor, 
for its ore and fuel boats, to provide a 
town for its army of woi'kers ; and $33,- 
000,000 more will be required for the 
construction now under way. 

Immense as this total is, it will be 
doubled — more likely trebled — before 
this later Pittsburg finds its level of 
maximum out^jut. 

For another twelve-month, the build- 
ers will outnumber the steel makers. 
Of the treasure already invested in the 
plant, the millions appropriated, no 
dollar has gone or will go for experi- 
ment. Here lies Gary's business sig- 
nificance — its lesson to every man who 
makes or sells for profit. The courage 
and imagination which have spent for- 
ty-two million dollars to clip a few 
vital seconds from the birth throes of 
a steel rail are linked with cool-brained 
conservatism. No device, however 
promising, which has not been tested 
exhaustively, beyond chance of failure, 
has been given place in the scheme. 
Gary takes no risks. The plant is a 
summary of the proved methods and 
tried processes of steel making de- 



veloped to the present limit of logic 
and safety. 

It is a convention of the short 
cuts which have slashed steel costs 
year by j^ear in the face of rising 
fuel, ore and labor. Its furnaces, its 
power generators, its conveying ma- 
chinery, its giant rolls and motors, 
though they mark the frontier of prog- 
ress in steel making, have all been tried 
out in previous installations. 

The best, the record breaking fea- 
tures of all other mills have been, as- 
sembled, magnified. To them have 
been added all that the craft of factory 
engineer and transportation expert 
could offer. A site, a town, a harbor 
literally have been manufactured to 
order. The result evolved is the most 
perfect big industrial plant the sun 
shines on. 

For the sun shines at Gary. That is 
the primary miracle. The pillar of 
cloud which marks other creative 
towns is lacking. Smoke spells waste; 
and here they have cut down its prod- 
igal blackness to a thrifty mist which 
hardly dulls the blue of the sky. 

Power — the basic factor in every in- 
dustry — is Gary's surpassing economy 
— by-product instead of tax. Blast 
furnace gas, ouce absolute waste and 
hateful poison in the air, is here har- 
nessed to titanic labors in the largest 
and most interesting group of gas en- 
gines in the world. 

Half the installation is in place — 
seventeen electric units generating 68,- 
000 horse-power and sixteen blowing 
engines developing 40,000 more. Get 
double that energy from steam turbines 
and your boiler room would eat 800,- 
000 tons of coal annually. There you 
have Gary's initial saving — the pin- 
nacle of free power towards which for 
twenty years steel makers in America 
have struggled. 



Ml^l 



"IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909" 







bl 

-.-j-*.:"=^ 


f 


^u|^^^^ f 




•'-c^mJB 


^^ 


jB^ B 


fW ■■■-: ^ ■ V| 




^i 


S^w 


""^fe^ - ^^' ' i '-J 




;^ 


t^l 


^ Wi 


^iK^ '''^ 




«^.| 


Wl^P'-l 


i»i 


fli^^Pt^ ■ ".y 


mi 


3: .^ 


^^^'' 




^^^MBB^MH^^ytp: 


bi* 


i^i^ittii 


m S 


^^^^m- 


K '- 


RSHSIHH^Ktt 


fef^ 


i; ^'f 


I^K. 






■i' 


1 


. 1 


k. ' § • 1 B 


^% 


9 ■ ,' ' " / 


■■■'' : 




.-,r : r-- 


^^- «-"*,„; k : 


i-'v;.,-; \'^ 


'i-*' ■ -J; , 



(lA.-^ WASHER, STOVES AND FURNACES 9 AND 10 
From the' du&t cati-heis, the gab lia\ els to the preliminary washers shown above, wher 
nsine process. In the background may h> 



L blast furnace i 



t undergoes the second 
th one of its "stoves" at the right. 



"Lean" gas Avas the pioneer effort 
towards economy — analysis of ore, 
coke, limestone and patient experi- 
ments in furnace management contrib- 
uting to that result. Followed crown- 
ing of the furnace stacks and capture 
of enough gas to fire the enormous 
"stoves" supplying the hot blast; 
finally retrieving of all the gas, and 
after cleansing, burning under boilers 
to get steam for power — not power 
sufficient to beat the product pig-iron 
into steel rails and bars. That was re- 
served for the self-contained efficiency 
of Gary, whose gas engines develop 
nearly twice as much energy from its 
furnace Avastes as would boilers and 
steam turbines, and where no coal is 
burned for power. 

Those engines — German invention 
linked with Yankee design — are the 
largest ever built to be driven by blast 
furnace gas. 



Massive as they are, the electrical 
units turn their centers eighty-three 
and one-third times a minute as quietly 
as a leisurely Corliss and buckle to 
their overloads without apparent 
strain. They mark the passing of 
steam in the steel industry, except as 
emergency and secondary power; just 
as Gary's central electric station and 
the displacing of hydraulic, pneumatic 
and steam appliances wherever elec- 
tricity can shoulder the job, sets a new 
standard of economy in steel mills. In 
the billet mill where speed in handling 
is a vital factor because the steel 
loses heat each moment, seven sizes 
of cranes, from five to seventy-five 
tons, expedite operations. To equalize 
the pull on the generators and thus 
squeeze the last atom of energy oiit of 
the gas an immense storage battery 
Avaits hungry for idle "juice," return- 
ing it on x^eak loads. 



THE SUM OF A THOUSAND SHORT CUTS 



25 



Steam has not been ousted complete- 
ly, however. It has its province of 
efRcieney ; and the study at Gary has 
been to match everj- job vs^ith the most 
economical agent. Therefore, after the 
first eleansings and the diversion of 30 
per cent, of the gas to the heating of 
the blast furnace "stoves," 71/2 per 
cent. — 1,700,000 cubic feet hourly — is 
burned under boilers. This supplies 
pressure and water pumps — four 30,- 
000,000 gallon pumps are in place now 
— warms the buildings and furnishes 
steam for the gas producers of open 
hearths and ''soaking pits." The pre- 
ponderance of gas for pOAver purposes 
is shown by the allotment of full 60 
per cent. — 13,400,000 cubic feet per 
hour — to internal combvistion engines. 

Gary's power is only the climax of 
its economies. They began before the 
first steam shovel burrowed into the 
Hoosier sand hills. They were boi-n 
with recognition by a great organiza- 
tion of specialists of the steel needs of 
the west — railroad steel, structural 
shapes, billets, plates and bars to feed 
a thousand customer factories — and 
the conception of a plant big enough 
to satisfy those needs. They took con- 
crete shape with the choice of a 
tramps' paradise for the raising of a 
city of industry and the mightiest and 
most efficient steel mill the captains 
a,nd the specialists together could 
evoke. 

The Strategic Factors Which Deter- 
mined Gary's Location. 

Many elements contrilnited to that 
choice. Assembling of raw materials 
and distribution of product were the 
vital, inseparable factors. Where could 
the ore of the Superior ranges, the 
coke of the AUeghenies and a store of 
limestone be laid down together at the 
lowest cost? Where were the mar- 
kets, existing and potential? Where 



an adequate labor supply, with sur- 
roundings making for stability and ef- 
ficiency? Could Diatei'ials, markets and 
labor be brought to a common focus, 
wliere v as land enough at reasonable 
prices to accommodate the visioned 
mill! Square miles were wanted: the 
new plant was building for the Cen- 
tury of Steel and experience warned 
that no boundaries be out on its ex- 
pansion. 

Gary was the answer — genius dis- 
covering it. Found and explored, it 
satisfied every requirement of the cor- 
poration strategists, i^roduction ex- 
perts and engineers. 

In the rough, however, with Lake 
Michigan and cheap carriage for its 
ore handy, it lacked a harbor. With- 
in easy call of an inexhaustible labor 
supply, it lacked a tributary town to 
house its workmen and anchor them to 
their jobs. With twelve square miles 
of land available, the strategic lake 
front was so cui, up by railroads and 
the superfluous Calumet river, that no- 
where could the builders find a base 
big enough for their operations. 

Compromise with any condition af- 
fecting production was not considered, 
however. The chosen site was treated 
like so much raw material — made over 
at tremendous cost that none of its 
limitations might restrict either speed 
or efficiency. "Build the perfect plant 
on paper," the command was, "then 
fit the site to the plant." 

Not less than two million dollars 
was spent on this work of preparation. 
The winding Calumet River was ban- 
ished to a new channel. The four rail- 
roads crossing the mill site were 
evicted like fussy children hindering 
industry — big roads, too, like the Lake 
Shore and the Baltimore & Ohio, which 
were torn up by the roots for over ten 
miles. In all, to strip the site and pro- 
vide connections, about 100 miles of 
track were moved and reconstructed. 



IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909" 



Cleared of obstructions, the site was 
yet too cramped for the builders. The 
base-line of their perfect mill was a 
string of sixteen 450-ton blast fur- 
naces, set at right angles to the lake, 
with ore docks and a harbor one mile 
long to feed them. Between the re- 
modeled river and the beach was only 
three-quarters of that distance. The 
fonr outer furnaces, therefore, were 
given stations out in Lake Michigan. 
Lacking elbow room on dry land, it 
was annexed off shore. In two years 
the lake has been pushed back 700 
feet. The harbor has crept even 
farther to deep water. 



ore, will handle it more cheaply and 
more swiftly than any other installa- 
tion on the lakes. For speed counts 
here as elsewhere. Every minute the 
big freighters lie at the dock costs the 
better part of a dollar. 

For economy's sake, also, the build- 
ers disregarded the twelve square 
miles they owned and kept their colos- 
sal units all on 800 acres. Compact- 
ness earned a premium, since the in- 
candescent metal from the blast fur- 
naces, the glowing ingots from the 
open hearths, would lose heat every 
needless foot they had to travel be- 
tween operations. 




MM 1)1 rHL(,Rl^\.l on N HI VKlll lU Il,l>l\i;s. 
Length of building 1,2U0 feet, width, 193 feet, height, 104 feet; capacity of building, with one furnace out of 
imission, 2,600 tons of steel per day , brick in furnaces, 1 1 ,200,000 ; structural steel used in construction, 5,600 tons. 



This harbor — created off-hand — has 
a 250-foot channel, a 750-foot turning 
basin inland and berths for half a 
dozen 12,000-ton ore boats. With the 
outer breakwater and ore handling 
machinery it will cost several millions. 
But economy is part of the bargain. 
Not only was it vital to the plan of the 
works : its unloaders and bridges work- 
ing synchronously will discharge more 



The continuous process — acme of 
production in any industry — means 
more at Gfirj than steady progress 
forward, without halt or retrograde 
movement. It stands for the straight- 
est, shortest, easiest line between ore 
docks and shipping yards. It stands 
for speed, for the elimination of every 
second not employed in conversion or 
manufacture, for the saving of every 



THE SUM OF A THOUSAND SHORT CUTS 



27 



possible heat iinit in molten iron, in 
glowing ingot, bloom and billet — since 
the loss mnst be restored and in the 
later process the steel would suffer in 
ductility, quality. Hence it stands for 
highest production per capita, per 
horse-power, per dollar invested. 

Playing Chess with Giant Powers, 
Economy the Prize. 

Intra-works transportation plays a 
mighty part in this thrifty hurry. 
The switch track, indeed, is the vital 
factor in Gary's scheme. Other steel 
plants may adopt its gas engines, copy 
its enormous open hearth units, du- 
plicate its surpassing rail mill. But 
they would have to rebuild from the 
bare ground up to attain the econo- 
mies secured at Gary by the arrange- 
ment of furnaces and mills. The plac- 
ing of these was dictated by the speed 
a laboring locomotive can make on a 
curving switch track. 

To relieve the locomotive and achieve 
speed, the right angle was abolished 
in locating the various units. Instead 
of setting the blast furnaces parallel 
or at right angles to the tracks serv- 
ing them, they were placed at an angle 
of 22 degrees, allowing a 200-foot ra- 
dius for the entering switch. A train 
of forty-ton ladle cars can negotiate 
that swiftly, easily, with little outlay 
of power and no danger of accident. 
Reversing on the main track, they will 
rush aAvay to the open hearths on long, 
easy curves of 800 feet radius. What 
goes in at the near end of each unit 
goes out at the other, one step nearer 
finished product. There is no "back- 
ing up" except of empty ladles or cars. 

From the casting floor of the open 
hearths, the ingots go to the mould- 
stripping houses, thence to the soak- 
ing pits and the ordeal of the rolls. 
Between blast furnaces and open 
hearths the angle to be overcome is 



only 57 degrees ; between the latter 
and the soaking pits about 70 degrees. 
The shortest curve in the 175 miles of 
track which will serve the mills has a 
radius of 200 feet ; nearly all are up- 
wards of 400 feet. The elevated ap- 
proaches to the furnaces and mills 
were planned with the same canny re- 
gard for speed where speed is vital ; 
elsewhere they are a compromise be- 
tween economy of space and of power. 
The company's locomotives will do the 
switching — the cost will depend on 
how fast they can move a load, how 
little coal and time they consume. 
Continuous gravity tracks at the ship- 
ping platforms allow the shifting of 
loaded cars without engines. 

Analysis of the work's transporta- 
tion can go no further than to say that 
it embodies the most advanced railway 
practice. SAvitch and service tracks, 
except those at the blast furnaces, are 
continuous : blockades are impossible, 
both ends being accessible and the for- 
ward movement of cars is uninter- 
rupted. The same principle obtains in 
the "Kirk" classification and storage 
yards and in the locomotive house, 
through which tracks and pits run at 
an angle, abolishing the turn table. 
These individual savings, multiplied 
daily a thousand times, make tremen- 
dous economies. 

Adjusting Furnaces and Mills to the 
Rhythm of Production. 

Nice calculation of distances and ex- 
act adjustment of units to their pro- 
ductive functions mark every step in 
Gary's plan. Ore' docks, furnaces, 
power plants and mills are knit into a 
harmony which excludes lost motion 
and squandered energy. Starting at 
the harbor side, no linear foot of space 
is wasted. The ore yards, hemmed in 
by concrete ramparts and spanned by 
the longest carrier bridges in existence 



28 



'IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909" 



— 498 feet, are wide enough to store a 
year's supply for the furnaces — 2,900,- 
000 tons for the first eight. In prac- 
tice, there will be no need of such a 
mountain of material, but the widtli 
contributes to straight line production, 
minimizing lateral ore shifting. 

Mere size, however, is not a fetish. 
That Gary will surpass all other mills 
in tonnage, in magnitude, in ultimate 
acreage, is accidental. What its build- 
ers sought everywhere and as a whole 
was efficiency, the economy of bal- 
anced production. Its mile of blast 
fiirnaces will be unique; but the indi- 
vidual stacks are not the largest in 
commission. They rate 450 tons : many 
in blast to-day exceed 600 tons. But 
Gary's creators, caring nothing for the 
grandiose, chose the smaller stacks be- 
cause these had proved more depend- 
able, manageable and profitable. Also 
because they offered the golden mean 
where strength of materials and stress 
of accident could be equalized. 

The open hearths, again, though of 
uncommon size — fancy a kettle of 
blinding, bubbling metal 16 to 40 feet 
square — are not America's largest. By 
grouping fourteen into a unit and pro- 
viding for six units — the four now 
ready or under construction have a ca- 
pacity of 12,000 tons a day — Gary 
overtopped the world in size of units 
and total output. The purpose, how- 
ever, Avas to provide the greatest num- 
ber of furnaces one superintendent and 
his staff could manage in production. 

Likewise the rail mill. In length it 
has no equal here or abroad — 1,800 
feet, to say nothing of the 1,400-foot 
groiip of soaking pits which it shares 
with the record-breaking billet mill 
adjoining. No lesser building would 
shelter the continuous train of rolls 
which will produce 100,000 tons of 
steel rails monthly — 28,000 more than 
the South Chicago world's record. 
Here, also, size was incidental to the 



most efficient and productive installa- 
tion. The shorter the mill and fewer 
the stands of rolls, the more time the 
ruddy steel would waste on tilting ta- 
bles and transfers, losing heat, losing 
precious seconds, whose saving would 
give larger output and lower costs. 

The Best in Equipment was Chosen for 
the Plant. 

Equipment was chosen by like stand- 
ards — the mathematics of experience. 
Therefore the ore unloaders of one 
maker were coupled with the bridges 
and carriers of another, while the ore 
bins and conveyors of a third feed 
the skip hoists of a fourth — though 
any one of the first three manufactur- 
ers could have furnished the orehand- 
ling machinery complete. For the same 
reason cranes were purchased from 
three different makers, the electric mo- 
tors bear the name plates of three rival 
manufacturers, while the light and 
heavy machinery were supplied by no 
less than a score of firms. The gas 
producers of the open hearths vary 
widely from the type at the soaking 
pits : but either is the design which fits 
best into the scheme of the unit sup- 
plied. 

Slosaic of the most approved machin- 
ery and methods, Gary has adopt- 
ed little without change, develop- 
ment or refinement. Gone is the 
epic day of steel making, when Cap- 
tain Bill Jones refused big royalties 
for patent rights whose sale might 
endanger his own leadership in costs 
and output. The practice, the short 
cuts, the cunning inventions of a hun- 
dred mill captains have been available. 
Brought together, enlarged to the Gary 
scale and accelerated to the Gary pace, 
they produce its economies. 

Speed and the elimination of human 
labor have been carried beyond any- 
thing steel makers have known. Re- 



THE SUM OF A THOUSAND SHORT CUTS 



29 



mote-control electric devices, automat- 
ic and interlocking, allow seven men 
to handle the forty or more operations 
in the rail mill at top speed yet with- 
out danger of accident. Two ingot 
"buggies," for instance, bring the 
flaming four-ton cubes from the soak- 
ing-pits to the first set of rolls. The 
thirteen pits cover 700 feet, yet one 
man out of sight in a gallery, by set- 
ting levers at the proper uotches, can 
send a "Iraggy" to the chosen pit, stop 
it, start it when loaded and bring it 
to the first rolls without turning his 
attention from the important bloom- 
ing operation. 



worked out by the company's engin- 
eers, operating men and machinery 
experts would recpiire many pages. In 
some degree they are the outcome of 
the company's policy of building its 
furnaces and mills under the eyes of 
the men who must run them. 

Superintendent -J. M. Gleason, Gary's 
head, was on the ground before the 
steam shovels. As the furnaces and 
mills took shape, they were put in 
charge of the bosses who will direct 
them, to check up the work of the 
contractors, to correct any tendency 
away from the solidly practical, to 
supply anything needed in design or 




tracks 1^/ Icet 



To show how speed is served by this 
system of automatic control one exam- 
ple must do. The elevating table of the 
blooming train weighing 250,000 
pounds is raised or lowered to the de- 
sired position in two seconds by the 
throwing of a lever, considering the 
mass moved a remarkable achievement 
— in which electric, pneumatic and hy- 
draulic power are all employed. 

To list refinements of this sort 



equipment. This has made for many 
small economies — a pocket for broken 
coke above the skid hoists of the blast 
furnaces ; steel ties in the soaking pit 
service tracks ; aerial bridges to avoid 
time-losing detours ; safety devices ev- 
erywhere. 

Economy shaped the construction 
program also. Excepting final efficien- 
cj% everything was subordinated to the 
end of production at the earliest prac- 



30 



"IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909" 



ticable date — of putting the millions 
invested to work without delay. For 
months the interest on Gary's cost has 
amounted to six thousand dollars a 
day. Effort was concentrated, there- 
fore. P'urnaces and mills were begun 
according to a schedule which would 
complete them on the date they would 
be needed to fill out the steel making 
machine — but not before. 

Four blast furnaces, tAvo batteries 
of open hearths, the rail mill and a pig 
iron casting plant, with their power 
auxiliaries, make up the first unit now 
gathering headway. The furnace 
stacks and stoves, plus the gas-clean- 
ing plant, Avere the slowest and most 
tedious construction. They were well 
up before the foundations of the open 
hearths were in. Next the harbor — 
the dredging of 1,500,000 cubic yards 
of sand — then the rail mill, the power 
station, the blowing and pumping 
plants, for all of which eqiiipment had 
been ordered nine months before the 
buildings were erected. 

The second quartette of furnaces 
will be "blown in" early next fall. 
Completing this unit will be a third 
group of open hearths, and a billet 
mill which will supply an axle mill and 
five merchant mills rolling 18, 14, 12, 
10 and 8 inch bars. With the third 
group of blast furnaces — their founda- 
tions are noAV in hand' — there must 
come new power, pumping and blow- 
ing stations, another group of open 
hearths and two plate mills, with an 
intermediate slabbing mill. The fourth 
unit, making up the tally of sixteen 
blast furnaces and rounding out the 
4,000,000-ton mill, will follow fast or 
slow as the demand for steel dictates. 

All the big work— big is the word 
for 2,100,000 cubic yards of excavation, 
772,000 yards of concrete, 225 miles of 
railroad track, 60,000,000 brick laid, 
144,000 tons of structural iron fabri- 
cated and erected, 80,000 tons of ma- 



chinery created and installed — has been 
done or is doing by contract and the 
clock, without regard for seasons. The 
thousand retail jobs, for which speci- 
fications are not easily drawn, have 
been handled by the company's own or- 
ganization of machinists, metal work- 
ers, electricians, masons. This insures 
dependable work at reasonable cost — 
the skilled men having been drafted 
from other plants — and familiarizes the 
organization with the construction and 
machinery it will have to keep in tune. 
Likewise the first buildings under roof 
were the boiler, machine, blacksmith, 
electric repair and other shops which 
will serve the works permanently. 

Gary is building out of surplus earn- 
ings, but no dollar is planted until the 
season of its fruitage approaches. In- 
deed, some things necessary to the 
completed plant have been postponed 
until their need becomes more impera- 
tive. There's the million-dollar break- 
water for the harbor, the contract for 
which has just been let. With South 
Chicago close at hand and offering a 
port in rough weather for Gary's ore 
freighters, the Indiana plant can wait 
without inconvenience for the fine days 
to summon its ore carriers. 

The Gayley "dry blast" furnishes a 
striking instance of this postponing of 
non-essential, though valuable, instal- 
lations. Tests at both company and 
independent furnaces have shown, ap- 
parently, that freezing the moisture out 
of the furnace blast increases output 
and saves fuel in important ratios. The 
process was experimental when Gary's 
plans were drawn ; to hitch it to the 
stacks now would postpone produc- 
tion. It has been moved aside, there- 
fore, until the absolutely essential in 
construction and equipment has been 
finished. The same rule postpones the 
installation of a Kommers by-product 
coke-plant — now undergoing a decisive 
test at the company's Joliet mill. 



THE SUM OF A THOUSAND SHORT CUTS 



Gary the city is the final element in 
the mill's formula of economy. Its first 
function is to attract labor — skilled 
and unskilled — by reason of its metro- 
politan coniforts and conveniences — its 
perfect sanitation, its reasonable rents, 
its low rates for water, gas and electric 
light, its parks and schools, opi^ortuni- 
ties to buy a home on terms even a 
pick-and-shovel man can compass. Liv- 
ing in such an environment, avoiding 
long car journeys morning and night, 
riveted to his job by his living condi- 
tions, every man will bring more bod- 
ily strength, a clearer brain and great- 
er efficiency to his daily tasts. Dupli- 
cate these conditions and results for 
superintendents and foremen, and the 
expenditure of .$2,500,000 on the town, 
the building of 500 houses for sale and 
rent, becomes a sober "business propo- 
sition." 

This is Gary today — the purpose al- 
ready expressed in concrete and steel 
or scheduled for realization as soon as 
the builders can effect it. The larger 
design is in the lap of the coming dec- 
ade. Given a demand to justify such 
expansion — here is no rivalry with ex- 
isting mills, but iDrovision for the fu- 
ture just dawning — Gary will surjjass 
Pittsburg as a producer of steel. For 
the sufficient reason that open-hearth 
steel, the favored material for rails, 
bridges and structural shapes, can be 
converted and rolled at Gary cheaper 
than anywhere else in the world. In- 
dustry is as fluid as water, seeking the 
lowest level always of production. 

Add Gary's strategic position, its 
transportation advantages, its unlimit- 
ed room for extension, and you have 
the imperative considerations which 



will plant the new mills of the eorjjora- 
tion's subsidiary companies — as these 
are made necessary by the country's 
hunger for steel products — at Gary, 
where the basic material is cheapest 
and freight charges are nil. The same 
logic of saving will gather hundreds of 
independent factories using merchant 
steel — may even double the present 
project and bring forth a twin plant 
making 8,000,000 tons of steel annual- 
ly, with miles of tributary work. Then 
Gary's circle of economy, its scheme of 
husbanding wealth otherwise dissipat- 
ed in unnecessary operations will be 
rounded and complete. The sum of a 
thousand short cuts will be east up 
and credited to America's resources. 



Significant and conclusive as are the 
facts stated by the writer of the fore- 
going, the reader's thought is called 
to the fact that it is only half of the 
story, leaving unstated two great eco- 
nomic factors, to-wit : First, the trans- 
fer of new basic cost conditions from 
the Pittsbi^rg region to the west and 
the great saving to the consumer of 
steel products on short freight ship- 
ments, and second, that the Gary lo- 
cation is practically the center of eco- 
nomical shijiment and distribution of 
the Steel Co.'s products throiighout the 
entire Mississippi Valley ; surely so 
now over the tens of thousands of 
miles of a score of big railroad sys- 
tems centering into the nearby Chica- 
go, and from thence by two belt lines 
into Gary, and later through the great 
new water-ways to be constructed for 
very low cost shipment to the Gulf of 
Mexico and farther. 



32 



"IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909' 




THE SECOND STAGE OF STEEL MAKING. 
At the right is one of the 1,400 foot buildings housing fourteen open hearth furnaces. At the left are the power 
station and one of the blowing engine houses, tributary to the blast furnaces. In the foreground are the concrete 
piers of a second group of open hearths, while the stacks of a third group show in the baclcground. 

The financial editor of the Chicago 
Tribune recently spoke of the first of 
said two matters as follows : 



The plant of the United States 
Steel corporation at Gary has begun 
turning out steel rails, being the first 
active operation of the plant. When 
the works are completed, the United 
States Steel corporation will, through 
plants now forming, control the steel 
business of the west. It will do this 
by making Chicago the basic point. 

Pittsburg Now Basic Point. 



seen that if Chicago be made the basic 
point, purchasers here would save the 
freight charge, getting their materials 
as cheap as they could be purchased in 
Pittsburg. 

This difference of $3.60 a ton will 
practically rule out all the independ- 
ent companies of the east, for they 
have no plants in the west. The steel 
corporation will have one competitor 
here in the Inland Steel Company, a 
concern of resiseetable proportions, but 
the big eastern concerns will be han- 
dicapped the amount of freight men- 
tioned. 



At present Pittsburg is the basic 
point and steel products shipped to 
Chicago must bear the cost of freight 
in addition to the cost of the steel. For 
instance, steel products selling at $32 
a ton at Pittsburg cost the Chicago 
consumer not only the price of the 
product but the freight from Pitts- 
burg to Chicago, which is 18 cents a 
100 pounds, or $3.60 a ton. It can be 



Economies From Coke Ovens. 

While it is true that the Gary plant 
must get its coal for coking purposes 
from the Connellsville district in Penn- 
sylvania, the cost of transportation will 
be overcome by the ability of the Gary 
plant to save all the by-products re- 
sulting from the manufacture of coke. 
The steel works at Pittsburg are not 



THE "MEANING OF GARY" 



33 



able to do this. The coke is made at 
the mines and the by-products are lost. 
The Gary plant will have every facili- 
ty for utilizing the gas and selling in 
the market such by-products as it may 
not use. 

Again, there will be a saving in the 
cost of transportation of ore. This 
saving will be the difference between 
the distance around the lakes from Du- 
luth to Pittsburg compared with the 
distance from the mines to Chicago. 
Again, the Garj^ i)lant will be alto- 
gether modern, enabling it to keep 
manufacturing costs at the lowest pos- 
sible level. 

The "Meaning of Gary." 

In the May, 1908 number of "Mid- 
land" Charles Pierce Burton wrote, in 
part, as follows, after having visited 
Gary a number of times to get the "lo- 
cal color" : 

The story of Gary, the industrial 
city which is being built to a pre- 
determined scale and plan on the sandy 
shore of Lake Michigan, in northern 
Indiana, reads like a tale from the 
Arabian Nights. The experience of 
Aladdin with his wonderful lamp has 
come true in the twentieth century. 
Our modern Aladdin is the United 
States Steel Corporation. Unlim- 
ited capital is the "slave of the lamp" 
and is building not a single palace but 
a city of palaces, and building it where 
Chicago ought to have stood and 
might have stood had not human per- 
verseness temporarily interfered with 
the purposes of the Almighty. AVhat 
of that! A century is but a second in 
the creative day. 

The purpose of this article is to con- 
sider the meaning of Gary rather than 
its physical construction. London has 
been a thousand years in the building. 
NcAv York and Philadelphia and Bos- 
ton are older than the nation. Com- 



pared with these Chicago is an infant, 
giant though it is. But London, New 
York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago 
are growths. Gary is a creation. The 
goddess Minerva sprang fully armed 
and eciuipped from the head of Jove. 
Gary is springing from the brain of 
the LTnited States Steel Corporation. 

In the summer of 1906 there was a 
single building in the twenty-two 
scpiare miles of scrub oak and sand 
now incorporated as the town of Gary. 
This lone building was the shooting 
lodge of a Chicago gun club. Today 
Gary has a population variously esti- 
mated at from 10,000 to 20,000 people. 
The shooting lodge has been torn down 
and even the topography of the coun- 
try has been changed to make way for 
the encroachments of industry and 
commerce. 

The necessity for Gary came when 
the Steel Corporation determined to 
concentrate its steel industry at the 
head of Lake Michigan, some miles 
from any human habitation. Manifest- 
ly the company could not employ 15,- 
000 men in the wilderness, which it is 
planned to do, without providing the 
conveniences of life. A city was in- 
evitable. The question was whether to 
permit a haphazard growth or to plan 
the city in advance and build it right. 

One year ago Gary looked like a 
great military camp, a city of tents. 
Today it is a curious mixture of camp 
and metropolis, the like of which prob- 
ably was never before seen in the his- 
tory of the world. Tents and little 
boarded shacks are still to be seen in 
every direction, for Gary's immediate 
problem is to build houses fast enough 
to accommodate the inrushing hordes 
of people. Much of the business, too, 
is conducted in temporary quarters. 
On Broadway, for instance, a tiny 
shack, hastily constructed and covered 
with tar paper, bears the imposing in- 
scription, "Gary Tribune," with the 



34 



"IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909" 



added information that fvirther down 
the street a handsome building is be- 
ing constructed for the newspaper's 
permanent home. In strange contrast 
with this primitive structure stands 
Gary's new $150,000 hotel, and the 
First National Bank building, classical- 
ly ornate, both models of their kind. 



product shipped back again to Chicago. 
The Pittsburg mills necessarily must 
be more or less antiquated, entailing a 
greater cost of manufacture per ton 
than the new mills now being con- 
structed at Gary, along the most ad- 
vanced lines known to science. It does 
not take a student of economics to 




GARY'S FIRST LAUNDRY. 
One of hundreds of scenes only two years ago. 



Whatever the jiresent purposes of 
the Steel Corporation may be, the cre- 
ation of Gary is a death-blow to the 
supremacy of Pittsburg as a steel-pro- 
ducing center. Gary, whose harbor 
will receive the company's ore-laden 
vessels direct from Lake Superior, has 
at its back door the unlimited coal 
fields of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. 
Moreover, Gary practically is Chicago, 
and Chicago is the greatest distribut- 
ing center of the steel product, with 
water outlet to the Atlantic ocean, and 
ultimately to the Gulf of Mexico. To 
reach Pittsburg, ore from the Lake 
Superior region must be taken to Cleve- 
land by boat and from there shipped 
by rail to the mills, and the finished 



foresee the natural outcome of such un- 
equal competition. 

Gary means that in the United States, 
commercial and industrial supremacy 
has shifted to Chicago and the middle 
west, following the center of popula- 
tion, which is only 123 miles from the 
steel city. Chicago — and what is true 
of Chicago also is true of its great sub- 
urb — in all this country is practically 
the center of population, of investment 
in manufacturing, of banking capital, 
of farm values. In ten years its bank 
deposits, the gciuge which shoAvs the 
pressure of thrift and enterprise, have 
increased more than 200 per cent. The 
drift of commerce is irresistibly to- 
ward its doors. 



THE "MEANING OF GARY" 



35 



Gary means the perfection of the 
great economic movement toward con- 
soli(la:tion and elimination of waste in 
every form, wiiich forever will make 
the beginning of the twentieth century 
notable. 

It means a greater Chicago, reaching 
out from its present confines, through 
its huge natural workshop, known as 
the Calumet district, once the bed of 
Lake Michigan — a huge inland seaport, 
both by way of the lakes to the Atlan- 
tic ocean and the Mississippi river to 
the Gulf of Mexico ; commercially one 
gigantic city. 



The old ways are gone forever. Gary 
will set the pace for future industrial 
development and industrial life. It is 
a far cry from the individualism of the 
primitive order, where every man's 
household was a workshop, to a United 
States Steel Corporation giving life to 
one million people; to Gary, in which 
the thought and ambitions of this cor- 
poration have materialized. Denounce 
the so-called ' ' trusts ' ' as we may ; rail 
at consolidation and corporate greed; 
these things are evil only in their 
abuse. These great consolidated in- 
terests are a vital part of the social 




BINZEN APARTMENTS. 
Gary needs a thousaad of them — and, of coui-se, will get them. 



It means that successful movements 
in the direction of beauty and cleanli- 
ness in city building must be economic 
rather than esthetic in their origin. 
Gary will be a clean city and a model 
city, free from sjnoke and soot, be- 
cause to make it so will put dollars in- 
to the treasury of a money-making cor- 
poration. 



order ; thej^ are an evolution, a result 
of natural law, and inevitable. 

In Gary we see the trust at its best — 
as a creator in a large sense. Through 
the eyes of the imagination we catch 
distant visions of a future greatness for 
this mighty central west, which would 
have staggered the founders of the re- 
public. 



36 



"IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909' 



In the iMarch, 1907, number of "Sys- 
tem" Mr. Daniel Vincent Casey Avrote, 
with his usual force and intelligence, 
an article on Gary, entitled Making A 
City to Order, from which the follow- 
ing are extracts : 

Up through the lioosier sand-hills 
where duck-hunters set blinds a year 
ago, the first furnaces of the greatest 
steel mil] ever conceived are pushing 
their Titanic million-dollar heads. Two 
miles inland, created by the same im- 
perial order, the fiat city of Gary is 
rising among the scrub oaks. 

Town and plant have only one pur- 
pose — to make steel in greater cjuanti- 
ties and at lower cost than it is made 
anywhere else in the world. Here is a 
city-to-be whose every detail answers 
to the call of business. 

That is a plain statement of the bold- 
est and best-imagined industrial pro- 
ject ever launched. 

How it is taking, shape at Gary, 
where Lake Michigan crowds farthest 
south into Indiana — how three thou- 
sand builders are making mock of win- 
ter with dynamite and parboiled con- 
crete, wind-shields and other cunning 
devices — how waste land three miles 
from a postoffice has been given a val- 
ue of $140 a front foot — these are de- 
tails of progress well worth the telling. 

Biit, like the stranger who needs 
blue-prints to grasp the relations be- 
tween this yawning excavation and 
those giant towers a mile eastward, the 
man who would understand Gary and 
the lesson it holds for every manufac- 
turer must begin l)y charting the ideas, 
the motives behind it. 

What is the reason for Gary? What 
is the plan of this $100,000,000 made- 
to-order, city of concrete and steel 
with its twelve square miles of raw 
material and its ultimate yearly pro- 
duction of $70,000,000 in new M^ealth? 
Why was it set down on a remote 
shore, five miles from a harbor, only a 



dozen miles from another plant owned 
by the same corporation and devoted to 
the same ends? Why was it deemed 
necessary to tie up millions in a town 
which is costing $15,000 a day to build, 
whose first "sub-division" will have 
twenty-seven miles of paved streets, 
Avitli water, gas and electric service 
mains, as well as sewers, available to 
every lot? 

How Every Question That Arose Was 
Analj'^zed. 

Answer to these questions involves 
the strategy and mathematics of "big 
business" — here applied with a knowl- 
edge and understanding of conditions 
and resources possible only with an or- 
ganization of specialists. For no ele- 
ment which would contribute to econ- 
omy of manufacture and maximum of 
output was neglected in the placing 
and designing of this Gary plant. Each 
was analyzed — assembling of raw ma- 
terials, distribution of product, exist- 
ing and future markets, labor supply 
and efficiency of workmen, cost of site 
and i^rovision for unlimited expansion 
— and the plan was developed with 
the care and certainty of a chemist 
comi^ounding a familiar formula. So 
far as it is possible in a human under- 
taking, chance was eliminated. 

Assembling of raw materials and 
distribution of product were matters of 
transportation. 

Here was iron ore in the Superior 
ranges, coal in southern Illinois and 
West Virginia, coke in West Virginia 
or Pennsylvania, limestone in Michigan 
or Illinois — where coiUd they be 
brought together with least cost and 
the resulting steel distributed with 
greatest ease and economy? 

Plainly not at the coal or iron mines, 
each remote from markets and from all 
the other sources of raw material, and 
unable to guarantee winter deliveries. 



MAKING A CITY TO ORDER 



37 



Some point midway, then, where lake 
carriers and railroads could meet at 
the threshold of the biggest market 
and lay down their ore and fuel to- 
gether without trans-shipment. 

The Causes Influencing- the Choice of a 
Location. 

Look at the map and you will see 
why choice of location for the new 
plant was limited to Chicago or its vi- 
cinity. The central market of the rich- 
est industrial region of the country, 
the railroad hub of the continent, itself 
a voracious consumer of structural 
steel, and the point where the shortest 
lake journey could be linked with the 
shortest haul from Virginia coke ovens 
and Illinois coal shafts, it had the ad- 
ded advantage of being the supply fo- 
cus of the corporation's system of sub- 
sidiary mills — manufacturing sheet 
steel, tin plate, bridges, structural iron, 
wire and wire products in a continuous 
chain of twenty plants in Ohio, Indi- 
ana, Illinois aud Vfisconsin. Growth 
of this inter-company market and the 
enormous demand of western lines for 
rails and bridges dictated the location 
of the plant within the Chicago rail- 
road zone, where rates would be most 
advantageous. 

Choice of a site was not so easy. Not 
acres but square miles were needed to 
accommodate the projected works, with 
their storage and railroad yards. The 
company's South Chicago plant was 
crowded for room, and this new mill 
was to be on an immeasurably vaster 
scale. It was building for the century, 
and history commanded that no limit 
be placed on its expansion. 

Within the city's boundaries not 
even a square mile was available. And 
the company had another cogent rea- 
son which Avill be elaborated later for 
desiring to escape from the city and 
its influence altogether. Therefore 
Gary. 



The Transportation Facilities Available 
in Gary. 

Twenty-six miles from the mouth 
of the Chicago river, it offered all that 
the companj^'s business generals and 
factory engineers could demand. Land 
Avas cheap — and ai^proximately twelve 
square miles were purchased before 
the corporation's intentions were di- 
vulged. Six miles of lake frontage, 
Avith five eastern trunk lines crossing 
the tract — tAvo of them distinctively 
coal roads — made easy the Avedding of 
lake and rail carriage for the chief raw 
materials, and furnished outlets for 
steel to mills and markets east and 
south. 

For Avestern and northern shipments, 
facilities were equally ideal; the cor- 
poration's industrial road, the Chica- 
go, Lake Shore & Eastern, touched 
Buffington at the northern verge of the 
tract. Extended it Avould connect 
the plant through the "outer belt 
line" Avith every railroad leav- 
ing the city, and would bring 
the ncAv mills inside the Chicago rate 
zone. In fact, the Gary site held one 
transportation adA'antage a city loca- 
tion could not afford — connection with 
the "outer belt" would preclude de- 
lays in terminal freight yards and in- 
sure prompt dispatch even in seasons 
of greatest congestion. 

What Made the Site of the New Town 
Advantageous. 

Physically the site Avas admirable. 
Half a jnile oft' shore, the lake Avas 
deep enough to float the company's 
biggest ore-carrier. Construction of a 
harbor, then, was a mere matter of ex- 
cavating a slip, building a break-water 
and dredging a channel — all in sand, 
AA'hich is the easiest of materials to 
move. 

Yet that sand had the merit of 



38 



"IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909' 



packing so hard three feet below lake 
level, that piling Avas unnecessary foi- 
the gigantic concrete monoliths of the 
furnace foundations. Hydraulic jets 
had even to be employed in driving 
the piles for the temporary retaining 
Avails of the slip. 

Nowhere is the canny wisdom of the 
company's engineers more evident than 
in the decision to extend the Avorks to- 
Avards deep water instead of bringing 
deep water in to the mills. 

Reference to the ground plan Avill 
make it clear that the final third of 
the plant Avill be erected on "made 
land" filled Avith sand from excava- 
tions and furnace Avastes. 

Besides the first purpose of ap- 
proach to deep Avater, this method fur- 
nishes a convenient "dump," provides 
the necessary Avidth of site otherAvise 
denied by the position of the Grand 
Calumet river and adds hundreds of 
valuable acres to the company's prop- 
erty. 

Site, room for groAvth and adequate 
transportation assured, the company's 
strategists turned to the important 
tAvin problems of labor supply and ef- 
fiency of Avorkmen, both questions 
vital to the largest success of the 
mills. 

Starting a plant five miles from the 
nearest toAvn, it Avas inevitable that the 
thousands employed would settle near- 
er or find other jobs. Weighing the 
conditions, the management deter- 
mined to shoulder the burden of build- 
ing the prospectiA^e city. 



Handling the Vital Problem of Labor 
Supply. 

First, to insure an attractive town, 
reasonable rents and municipal com- 
forts and conveniences as the means of 
binding employes permanently to the 
Avorks, thereby increasing individual 
efficiency. 

Second, to combat the hostility of 
trades unions — the Gary mill is to be 
an open shop and this was the reason 
already mentioned for wishing to es- 
tablish it outside Chicago — by offering 
material advantages likely to Aveigh 
against labor anathemas. Of these 
sixty-cent gas, water and electric light 
at parallel Ioav rates, and opportunity 
to buy a home on terms possible even 
to day laborers are the most urgent. 

A third motive lay in the company's 
desire to colonize its superintendents, 
foremen and office employes near the 
Avorks — a thing to be realized only by 
proAnding quarters as desirable or even 
better than they could find in the 
neighboring toAvns. 

Philanthropy, then, had little part in 
the founding of Gary, the city. It is a 
"business proposition" exploited as 
town-sites usually are, as well as a 
practical recognition of the truth that 
good drainage, comfort and accessibil- 
ity in your Avorkmen's homes are re- 
flected in increased factory efficiency. 
Saloons and speculators are barred by 
clauses in the deeds, becaiise liquor 
saps the energy of Avorkmen and spec- 
ulation Avould retard the sale of the 
company's lots. 



CREATING THE NEWEST STEEL CITY 



39 




ONE OF THE CORNER RESIDENCES (JACKSON STREET). 



The Regulations Under Which Gary Is 
Being- Built. 

A "model town" in the best — the 
municipal engineering — sense, Gary 
differs from Europe's "garden cities" 
and America's Pullmans by putting a 
premium on property-holding and 
eliminating company control of muni- 
cipal affairs. It has its council, mayor, 
school board, political parties, and it 
will come as near self-government as 
the average American town. Barring 
the restrictions in the deeds and the 
supplying of Avater, gas and electric 
current in bulk to the municipality at 
about cost — solely to reduce living ex- 
penses and so anchor its employes to 
the work with the chains of self-inter- 
est — the company's connection with 
the town will cease when its lots are 
sold. 

Many of the readers, especially 



those who contemplate the possibilities 
of futiu'e residence in Gary, will be in- 
terested in the following condensation 
of an ably wi'itten article by Mr. Gra- 
ham Romeyn Taylor, of the editorial 
staff of the magazine, THE SURVEY, 
formerly "Charities and the Com- 
mons," appearing in the April, 1909, 
number, and the writer inserts the 
same even though something else- 
where said in this book is repeated. 

Accustomed as Americans of this 
day are to rapid accomplishment, not 
one who visits the suddenly created 
town of Gary at the southern tip of 
Lake Michigan fails to experience a 
new thrill of amazement. The story 
of this marvelous achievement of the 
steel industry has been frequently told. 
The purpose in these pages is not mere- 
ly to repeat the wonder tale of Gary's 
magic growth — steel plant and town — 
but to present a brief sketch of the 



40 



'IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909" 



framework and structm-e of the place 
and its rising social agencies, with 
some impressions of how these serve 
the needs of the rapidly gathering pop- 
ulation. 

G-ary is not quite three years old. In 
April, 1906, the region was a waste of 
rolling sand dunes sparsely covered 
with scrub oak and interspersed with 
ponds and marshes. To-day there is a 
great steel plant covering approximate- 
ly a square mile, equipped with a 
made-to-order harbor for the great ore 
freighters, and a town of 12,000 inhabi- 
tants, with fifteen miles of paved 
streets, twenty-five miles of cement 
sidewalks, two million dollars' worth 
of residences completed and occupied, 
a sewer system, water and gas plants, 
electric lighting, a national and state 
bank, six hotels, three dailies, and one 
weekly newspaper, two fine public 
schools, several substantial church edi- 
fices, ten denominations represented in 
church organizations, and many well 
appointed stores and shops handling 
practically all the commodities that a 
good sized city usually needs. There 
are forty-six lawyers, twenty-four 
physicians and six dentists. 

Situated on the main lines of five 
great trunk railroads, no less than fifty 
trains a day stop at Gary, to say noth- 
ing of the frequent service by the in- 
terurban trolleys. 

This mere enumeration is enough to 
show an astonishing growth from the 
wilderness of three years ago. A visit 
proves far more convincing. A walk 
two miles along a fine business street a 
hundred feet in width, well paved 
with granitoid, lined on both sides 
with eighteen foot cement sidewalks 
and flanked by Avell built fire-proof 
business buildings ; to be told that no 
more land is for sale on this thorough- 
fare ; to glance up the side streets and 
see block after block of attractive res- 
idences ; to watch the busy crowds hur- 
rying back and forth on BroadAvay ; 



and, above all, to talk with energetic 
business men of the place, who look 
you straight in the eye and quietly as- 
sure you that in a few more years this 
ncAV capital of the steel industry will 
suri^ass Indianapolis as the largest city 
in Indiana — well, merely to spend a 
day in the place is to find incredulity 
vanishing as completely as the wilder- 
ness itself. 

Turn northward, retrace your steps, 
and the underlying reason of your 
newly acciuired faith, the economic ba- 
sis of it all, takes definite shape before 
your eyes. Here is the real fact which 
gives solid substance to the community 
you have thus far accepted because 
your eyes told you to, but which until 
now you could not explain. At the 
northern terminus of Gary's Broadway 
is the entrance to a steel plant destined 
soon to be the largest in America. Here 
the finger of unerring calculation has 
located the geographical spot where 
greatest economy dictates the assemb- 
ling of raw material, and the center of 
distribution for finished steel. Belief 
in Gary and its future as a community, 
then, rests upon the fundamental be- 
lief of the shrewd and farsighted men 
directing America's steel production, 
that this is the place at which to con- 
centrate in one great plant the sum of 
all the best methods and processes else- 
where demonstrated — that here is the 
spot to embody the present acme of ef- 
ficiency and economy in the making of 
steel. The thoroughness of this be- 
lief may be seen in the fact that, act- 
ing upon it immediately, the United 
States Steel Corporation without hesi- 
tation has poured out during the last 
two years $42,000,000 and soon will 
have "spent a total of $75,000,000 to 
build its plant, create a harbor for its 
ore and fuel boats, and provide a town 
for its army of workers. 

Even these millions, spent "to clip a 
few vital seconds from the birth throes 
of a steel rail," as a recent writer has 



THE NEW STEEL CITY 



41 



put it, are said to be only a half or a 
third of the total which will eventually 
be invested to place this new Pittsburg 
on its level of niaxiniuni output. 



shops of the Chicago, Lake Shore and 
Eastern Railroad — a Steel Corporation 
road. Extensive sites for large plants 
of the American Car and Foundry 




FIl'TH A\ I'lMK l':Asr FltoM W ASHI X(,'I'(JN STREET IN XOVEMBER, IflOS. 

The temporary paving in the center is about to be removed for the construction of the street car 1 
entire length of Fifth Avenue. 



rthe 



The belief of the United States Steel 
Corporation in this new location for 
great industrial development is meas- 
ured not alone by the great mill al- 
ready beginning its work. To assure 
for decades to come space in which this 
mill and its various departments may 
expand, to provide sites for many sub- 
sidiary manufacturing plants which 
make large use of steel, and to make 
so]ne provision for the population of 
workers, a great tract of nearly twenty 
square miles has been acquired, the 
shore frontage on Lake Michigan be- 
ing eight consecutive miles. Already 
located and in operation on this tract 
are the works of the Universal Port- 
land Cement Company, and the repair 



Company and the American Locomo- 
tive Company have been selected, and 
in addition to these the American Steel 
and Wire Company, the American 
Bridge Company, and the American 
Tin Plate Company are expected soon 
to become members of this great in- 
dustrial group. 

La the various parts of the steel plant 
itself at least 14,000 men will be em- 
ployed. The combined working force 
of the establishments now constructed, 
or whose location is practically deter- 
mined, is likely to number well Tip to- 
ward four or five times that total. 

So much for the industrial basis un- 
derlying Gary as a community. The 
conditions of work, the ever increasing 



42 



"IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909" 



part played by macliiuery, the lessen- 
ing of manual toil, the greater precis- 
ion in handling material and directing 
processes, the better protection of the 
workman at his work — all the provis- 
ion for this interplay of hand and 
mind with machine must here be left 
without mention. 

What of Gary, the town, and the 
community of peoj^le? To sketch its 
rise and structure is the purpose of 
this article. To readers familiar with 
the Pittsburg Survej'' and its thorough- 
going method, the present ai'ticle will 
be seen to be merely a fragmentary 
suggestion that here at Gary is the 
opportunity for a striking comparative 
study. The Pittsburg Survey was a 
close range analysis of the social, civic, 
and industrial conditions of the Penn- 
sylvania steel district. It not only 
"blue-printed" the present Pittsburg 
region but in some measure traced the 
incoming flow of peoples and the grad- 
ual evolution of conclusions. It took 
account of a community wherein the 
steel industry grew piecemeal by ad- 
ding this part and that process — its 
growth continually subject to the 
more or less rigid, conditions imposed 
by a long established city. The growth 
of the various plants was, in most cases, 
•not so rapid as to require any special 
housing provison other than that 
which haphazardly might be supplied 
from time to time by the company or 
outsiders. In some of the plants 
themselves, the installation of larger 
and larger machinery and more exten- 
sive trackage was not accompanied by 
any increase in the area covered. Un- 
der these conditions the leeway and 
"give" were wrenched from the hu- 
man element. If tracks were needed 
in a passageway previously used only 
by workmen afoot, the tracks came in. 



no additional passageway was provid- 
ed, and the workmen began dodging 
the shrieking little locomotives as best 
they could. 

Here in Gary all is different. Planned 
at the outset on an enormous scale, it 
was unnecessary even remotely to con- 
sider space limitations. The visitor is 
impressed with the elbow room, and 
the absence of a dingy clutter such as 
characterizes the average Pittsburg 
steel mill. Men have light in which to 
see their work, room in which to do it, 
and an orderly arrangement that 
means as much for safety as any of the 
protection devices Avhich have been 
installed. 

. In Gary, the town, too, there was 
absolutely unhampered opportunity to 
arrange the streets, provide the funda- 
mental necessities of community life, 
determine the character of its houses 
and predestine the lines of growth, all 
in the best and most enlightened way. 
The growth of the town through the 
various stages of sand dunes, tents and 
shacks, the latter made out of boards, 
tar paper, canvas and anything else 
at hand, to the present community as 
briefly outlined at the beginning of 
this article, is no less bewildering — 
and in many respects is even more in- 
teresting — than the creation of the 
great mill. The Gary of to-day, with 
all its substantial buildings, shows 
many evidences of the successive stages 
of its development. Many of the 
shacks hastily thrown together are still 
occupied by the workmen and immi- 
grant laborers who have been engaged 
in the construction, and several tents, 
reinforced by a few boards and a little 
banking of sand against their walls as 
a feeble protection against winter cold, 
are yet serving as habitations. 



THE NEW STEEL CITY 



43 




STEEL COMPANY'S GENEKAI, 



Bl'ILDIXc; 



and viaduct for main entrance to the works at the head of Broadwa 



The officials of the Steel Company 
say frankly that the building of the 
town was incidental, that their main 
concern was to construct a steel plant, 
and that city-making was a side issue 
into which necessity alone drove them. 
They must have a place for their em- 
ployes to live. This could not be ex- 
pected to develop at all proportionate- 
ly to the sudden need, unless the com- 
pany assumed much of the responsi- 
bility. Moreover, a haphazard town 
would certainly prove an inefficient one 
in serving the daily life and needs of 
the men whose brains and muscle mean 
the real ongo of the mill. An ineffi- 
cient tOAvn, therefore, in some degree 
would throw a paralyzing spell into 
this place designed to be the very cita- 
del of economy and efficiency in steel 
production. A wholesome town was 
recognized as essential. 

The Gary Land Company, a subsi- 
diary corporation of the United States 



Steel Corporation, was formed to se- 
cure the great tract of land to serve 
the present and long future needs of 
steel plant, town, and subsidiary man- 
ufacture interests. TJpon this com- 
pany was thi^s thrown the work of 
making the town. The holdings of the 
land company form a strip along Lake 
Michigan, extending from Indiana 
Harbor eastward some eight miles, if 
land now to be acquired is included, 
and averaging two miles in width — 
about two and one-half miles wide at 
the site of the plant and town. Almost 
in the center of this strip is the mill. 
At the latter 's eastern edge is the har- 
bor slip, 250 feet wide, extending in 
from the shore, affording berth for half 
a dozen 12,000-ton ore freighters, and 
equipped with a 750-foot turning basin 
at its inner terminus. Just west of the 
mill are the repair yards and shops 
of the Chicago, Lake Shore and East- 
ern Railroad. Adjoining them on the 



44 



"IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909" 



south is the site selected for the great 
plant of the American Car and Foun- 
dry company. East of the mill and 
just across the harbor slip extensive 
coke ovens to serve the mill are con- 
templated. South of these and south- 
east of the mill is the site determined 
within the last few weeks for the big 
works of the American Locomotive 
Company. 



the mill and other plants of the town. 
It is interesting to learn of the pains 
the company is taking to find out by 
experiment what species of trees will 
prove most satisfactory in Gary's san- 
dy soil. The citizens of the town, too, 
are alive to the desirability of tree 
planting. With more zeal than reason 
they recently agitated for an ordinance 
making tree-planting compulsory, but 




VAN BUREN STKEET NORTH FROM STH AVENUE IN 1908. 



Directly south of the mill is the so- 
called subdivision No. 1, laid out by 
the Gary Ijand Company. The company 
itself has erected 506 dAvellings and is 
selling lots for business and residential 
purposes, subject to certain restric- 
tions which will be detailed later. Sub- 
division No. 1 is the only part of its 
holdings Avhich has been plotted into 
lots by the company. Adjoining sub- 
division No. 1 on the south are smaller 
tracts owned by real estate dealers, 
who are rapidly selling the lots they 
have plotted. It will be seen at once 
that Gary subdivision No. 1 is the 
most central position with reference to 



readily saw the wisdom of delay, pend- 
ing the experiments of the company 
and the working out of some scientific 
and harmonious scheme. 

The whole streeL scheme of Gary — in 
fact the whole plan of the place — hangs 
on the main thoroughfare, Broadway. 
The idea of a civic center with a 
grouping of public buildings seems not 
to have occurred to those who designed 
the town. W^ith the steel plant fore- 
most in mind, and the town incidental, 
it is natural that the main fact in 
Gary's town plan is a broad street lead- 
ing straight south from the mill en- 
trance. Already it is paved three miles 



THE NEW STEEL CITY 



45 



and laiore. Up this great artery in the 
morning, and down it at night, sweep 
the throngs of workers. 

Eificiency in town, it has already 
been said, was recognized as a factor in 
the eificiency of the steel plant. This 
town efficiency will be made apparent 
many times in this article. 

Broadway, which is 100 feet wide, 
and Fifth avenue, which crosses Broad- 
way at right angles, in the northern 
part of subdivision No. 1 and is 80 
feet wide, are the two principal streets 
plotted for business purposes. The 
next streets to Broadway, paralleling it 
on east and west, are also reserved for 
business. Excepting Broadway and 
Fifth avenue, all streets are 60 feet in 
width. Along all streets but the foi^r 
business streets a building line of 20, 
2.5, or 35 feet is established. This has 
been observed in the building of the 
company houses, and each contract for 
the sale of a lot stipulates its obser- 
vance in any building to be erected. 
An alley, in most cases 30 feet wide, 
runs the long way in the center of each 
block. The lots in the residence dis- 
tricts are mostly 30 by 150 feet. A few 
are only 25 feet wide and the length 
of some is only 125 feet. It will be 
noted that this allows for a good sizeti 
back yard, but that the space between 
houses is not likely to be considerable. 
The proportion of a lot which may be 
covered by buildings, and the number 
of buildings to be permitted on a lot, 
do not seem as yet to be worked out 
in the building code of the town. Lots 
on the business streets are uniformly 
125 feet in length. On Broadway and 
Fifth avenue they are 25 feet wide ; on 
the two other business streets parall- 
eling Broadway they are 30 feet wide. 
The typical block is 600 feet in length, 
permitting 40 lots of 30 feet width in 
the residence district. Street paving is 
granitoid on two miles of Broadway, 
and concrete, brick or macadam, on the 
miles of other streets already paved. 



In the provision of the fundamental 
utilities to serve the necessities of the 
population, etficiency and amplitude 
are manifest in marked degree. With 
no permanent population yet on the 
ground and even before the streets 
were laid, the company immediately 
constructed sewer and water systems 
large enough for years to come. Of 
primary importance is the fact that all 
sewers and water mains are laid in the 
alleys, so that in the future there will 
be little need of tearing up the streets 
to make repairs or new installation. 

The cost of sewers and paving has 
been distributed over the lots in the 
subdivision, being included in the price 
of each so that there is no assessment 
for these improvements. The sewer 
system can readily be extended to the 
sixbdivisions not owned and develox^ed 
by the company, assessment on the lots 
defraying the cost. 

Water supply is furnished by the 
Gary Heat, Light and Water Company, 
another subsidiary company of the 
steel corporation. It furnishes also, as 
its name implies, electric lighting and 
gas. There is a provision that owner- 
ship of these public utility plants may 
be acquired hereafter by the city. For 
water supply a three mile tunnel six 
feet in diameter extends a mile and a 
half into Lake Michigan. Its shore 
end is at the pumping station — this 
and a 500,000 gallon water tower in 
the park site west of Broadway. Al- 
ready twenty-five miles of mains have 
been laid, and the capacity of the sys- 
tem is 20,000,000 gallons a day. To 
appreciate the advantage in town effi- 
ciency, as contrasted with some other 
localities where the United States 
Steel Corporation acts as landlord, 
compare with this water system the 
pump in Pittsburg's "Painters Row," 
the only source from which no less than 
568 people can get water fit to drink. 



46 



'IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909" 




BROADWAY NORTH FROM EIGHTH AM, Mi; I.\ NOXKMHER, liUIS, 



since which date the car line center space has been paved. There are 

That the ''Painters Row" pump is ion, 



not tlie only feature of older steel 
towns upon Avhieh Gary marks im- 
provement is already apparent to read- 
ers of the Pittsburg Survey articles re- 
cently published in this magazine. Per- 
haps no part of Gary's development is 
so immediately pleasing as the houses. 
The Gary Land Company, as already 
stated, has erected 506 dAvellings. Ap- 
proximately 250 more have been built 
by individuals who have bought lots 
in the company subdivision. Instead 
of rows upon rows of exactly similar 
— and usually ugly — houses, which 
generally come to mind at the mention 
of "company houses," there is in Gary 
an admirable diversity of architecture. 
Combined with this, however, is har- 
mony in the general effect, due no 
doubt to the fact that the whole work 
was in the hands of but two architects. 
The cheapest houses are in the north- 
east corner of the company subdivis- 



light lamps at each street crossing. 

locally called "Hunkyville," 
where the lowest paid immigrant labor 
lives. The next better houses are in 
the northwest corner, known as "Kirk- 
ville," and are occupied almost entire- 
ly by Avorkmen in the repair shops of 
the Chicago, Lake Shore & Eastern 
Railroad nearby. The rest of the 
houses are scattered over the central 
portions of the subdivision, those to 
the west of Broadway being somewhat 
better than those to the east. The 
quality of dwellings east of Broadway, 
however, is likely to be improved, noAv 
that the American Locomotive Com- 
pany's works are to be built just east 
of the subdivision. The nearest avail- 
able location for the dwellings of offi- 
cials and the more highly paid clerical 
force will be the eastern portion of the 
subdivision. It is likely that the fifty 
"double drygoods boxes," as Hunky- 
ville houses are called, will be moved 
elsewhere. 



THE NEW STEEL CITY 



47 



With evident intention of avoiding 
the mistakes of Pullman, the company 
announces its desire to sell lots as rap- 
idly as possible, so that any paternal- 
ism it has exercised may speedily come 
to an end. The price of the company's 
more advantageously located lots is 
still kept below that of lots outside its 
subdivision. Great care, hovv^ever, is 
used to see that they do not fall into 
the hands of speculators Avho will hold 
them vacant. It is the desire to make 
them available for employes of the 
company. 

The agreement concerning the sale of 
a lot stipulates that the plans must be 
approved by the agent of the com- 
pany, that the building must be com- 
pleted within eighteen months, that it 
must be built back of the prescribed 
building line, and that no liquor is ever 
to be sold on the premises. Exception 
to the latter provision is made in the 
case of a few places on Broadway. A 
number of saloons had sprung vip 
south of the company subdivision, 
where there are no restrictions regard- 
ing the sale of lots. All saloons in the 
town of Gary, however, were closed on 
April 1, 1909, when the region became 
"dry territory." 

Gary's people — who are they? The 
study of Pittsburg's f)opulation and 
Avhence it came was compared to an an- 
alysis of a river's cvirrents. At Gary 
such a study would be like cross-sec- 
tioning a water spout. Perhaps the 
writer's own experience was character- 
istic. The first word spoken to him in 
Gary after he alighted from the train, 
a complete stranger on his first visit, 
was by a foreigner inquiring his way. 
At a cafe on Broadway which looked as 
if it had been in good running order at 
least a year, the waiter, in response to 
a question, said tha,t the place had been 
open five days, and that he himself had 
arrived the night before last. An 
"oldest inhabitant" — about three 
years in the town — describing the 



influx of people said they seemed to 
sprout suddenly up out of the ground. 

The growth of Gary's population 
may be divided into two main stages, 
corresponding to the development of 
the place. First came the construction 
crowd. W^hile a large number of these 
are still on the ground, the transition 
to the permanent working force of the 
steel plant is now taking place, the 
mill having recently started operation. 
This change, however, Avill not be sud- 
den, for much construction work yet 
remains to be done. Prom the begin- 
ning there has, of course, been a steady 
growth in the element identified with 
the development of private business 
activities, etc., and in the number of 
lawyers, physicians and members of 
the other professions. 

The construction force was brought 
in principall}^ by contractors. With 
its make-up and living conditions the 
steel company had not much to do. A 
large proportion was made up of the 
lowest paid immigrant labor. While 
the construction i^eriod has lasted 
many months, it of course has not been 
long enough to warrant the provision 
of any but the most temporary sort of 
shelter. 

The transition from construction 
gaiigs to permanently employed steel 
workers means that from now on the 
proportion of low-grade foreign labor 
will diminish. The great inadeciuacy 
of present housing for the lowest paid 
labor may be thus in some measure ac- 
counted for. It must be said, hoAvever, 
that housing facilities of all sorts are 
not sufficient ; a situation due, it is 
probable, not so much to the failure of 
any one to meet responsibilities, as to 
the plain fact that it takes time to 
build houses. 

The extent to which the population 
varies from that of the average fam- 
ily community may be seen in the fact 
that ordinary computation from a 
knoAvledge of the number of men over 



48 



"IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909" 



twenty-one years of age, would give 
Gary approximately 30,000 population. 
This fact is also significant in connec- 
tion with predictions on the probable 
growth of Gary's total population, 
which should increasingly tend to 
reach the normal proportion to men of 
voting age. 

Gary's vote in April, 1907, was 29; 
in November, 1908, eighteen months 
later, it was over 2,000. At the start 
there were barely enough voters to or- 
ganize town government. The present 
Gary is a place of well informed and 
alert citizenship. Already the various 
functions of the modern city are being 
well organized. A police force came 
early. The conditions in the pioneer 
days of this place, just twenty-six 
miles from Chicago's downtown, were 
startingly lilie those of the western 
frontier. The region had its traditions ; 
it was Avhere the police of Chicago a 
few yeai-s ago had pitched battles 
with the notorious "ear barn" ban- 
dits," who were eventually captured 
and hung. The earliest construction 
crews had their quota of ruffians. And 
the health emergencies of a mushroom 
community needed strong authority. 
Curious enough most of the other mu- 
nicipal functions were provided before 
the fire department, which, at its estab- 
lishment of a few months ago, was 
urgently needed to bring down insur- 
ance rates. A fine building is just 
about to be constructed for these two 
branches of the city service. For some 
time to come it will also house the 
other executive offices of the local gov- 
ernment. 

Schools were early provided. The 
first ones were portable frame affairs, 
which met the need dux'ing the con- 
struction of the fine two-story and 
basement Jefferson School which the 
company erected at a cost of $80,000. 
The Emerson School, designed by the 
architect of the famous St. Louis 



schools, is nearing completion at a cost 
of over $200,000. A parochial school 
costing about $50,000 is soon to open 
its doors. The pupils in the public 
schools numbered over 1,000 at the 
close of school last spring. Thirty-six 
teachers are noAV employed. The new 
Emerson School will have a play- 
ground of about an acre and a half. 
The Jefferson School, while it has no 
playground adjoining, is but half a 
block from a park space. 

A¥orking in close co-operation with 
the schools is the recently organized 
public library — perhaps, in proposed 
scope, the most progressive civic insti- 
tution in Gary. An interesting com- 
mentary on the town's growth, and a 
circumstance which doubtless has some- 
thing to do with the fine co-operation 
between the library and the schools, 
is the fact that the library could not 
be organized under the general library 
law of the state, which requires that 
the five library trustees must have been 
residents of the place for five years. 
There being none with this qualifica- 
tion, the library was organized tinder 
another statute allowing it to be con- 
ducted by the school authorities, who 
on this account are authorized to levy 
a larger tax. Housed at present in a 
store and basement, the library main- 
tains an attractive reading room, and 
in the basement evening classes for im- 
migrants studying English, with an in- 
structor furnished by the schools. 

Branch libraries are to be in every 
school, and a progressive service in this 
connection will be rendered in teach- 
ing the children and giving them ex- 
perience- m the use of library facili- 
ties. For certain periods each week 
the children of each grade will be 
placed in charge of the branch librar- 
ian. The importance of this as a stim- 
ulus to continued use of books after 
school days are past, is apparent. 



THE NEW STEEL CITY 



49 




THE JEFFERSON PUBLIC SCHOOL IN FEBRUARY, 1908. 



Schools, and library, too, are to be 
used as social centers. The former 
have gymnasiums, natatoriums and 
manual training, and each day pupil 
keeps his books in lockers so that the 
classrooms may be freely used at night. 
The librarian is now planning what 
the permanent library building shall 
provide. In addition to the ordinary 
library facilities he proposes baths, 
bowling, billiards and pool, and a gym- 
nasium available also for dances. If 
these features are included, Gary's li- 
brary will be the first in this country 
maintained solely by public funds, to 
provide such social and club facilities. 
The few Avhieh now make such provis- 
ion are located in industrial towns 
where, in addition to public funds, a 
scheme of membership fee is in force 
or the industrial concern gives an en- 
dowment or meets the deficit. 

A small hospital is at present pro- 
vided by the Sisters of Mercy. This 
year, however, the steel company will 
erect a large one costing .$200,000 for 
the use of its employes. It will be lo- 
cated on the east side of Broadway, 



near the entrance of the mill. Two 
parks have been plotted, one four 
blocks west, and the other two blocks 
east of Broadway. The former is four 
blocks in area and the latter two. 
Upon the larger one the water tower 
and pumping station have been erect- 
ed. The tower is at present built en- 
tirely of steel, but the design has been 
made to sheath it attractively with 
brick and stone. 

The prime economic importance of 
extensive harbor and dockage facili- 
ties for the steel plant and all the sub- 
sidiary manufacturing interests is well 
recognized. But the most serious and 
immediate consideration ought to be 
given to the question, Avhether some 
portions of the lake shore, somewhere 
along the ten miles, cannot now be re- 
served for park jjurposes. The region 
is one of great geological and botanical 
interest and its wild and distinctive 
scenery has for years attracted groups 
of nature lovers from Chicago. Prom 
Chicago's standpoint, therefore, it is 
desirable that regions of natural beau- 
ty near her boundaries be prescribed 



50 



"IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909" 



for the nse of tlie great and growing 
metropolitan population. But above 
all, from the standpoint of the people 
living in Gary, still more especially 
for the numbers who are yet to come, 
this question is urgent. It has been 
said regarding this very situation that 
the steel companies "are not in the 
summer resort business." And from 
a.utJioritative sources has come the in- 
formation that the matter of the peo- 
ple's access to the lake was considered, 
but that it was not thought "safe for 
future industrial expansion" to set 
aside specific portions of shore for park 
pvirposes. The intention of these para- 
graphs is not to argue the point — the 
winter's knowledge of the factors in 
the question is slight indeed — but 
merely to direct some attention to this 
problem confronting Gary, the com- 
munity. This is the sort of problem, 
moreover, to which frecjuently people 
do not become aroused until too late. 
Considerable agitation of it is already 
reported to have arisen among Gary's 
citizens. May it be co-operatively 
taken up by all interests and solved 
satisfactorily and speedily. 

This sketch touches only the more 
obvious points to be observed on the 
surface. It does not even cover all 
these. For instance, the progress being 
made by religious organizations could 
be interestingly detailed. And one of 
the many community problems scarce- 
ly mentioned is the need for a far- 
sighted look toward an eventual group- 
ing of public buildings. On the indus- 
trial side, it would be of the greatest 
interest to study wages in relation to 
the standard of living. Grant that the 
latter is exceptionally high — housing 
and fundamental utilities bear this out 
— what are the costs in relation to 
wages 1 

Gary, by reason of its industrial 
significance and the marvelous growth 
of its community life is a marked place 
for the student of social, civic and in- 



dustrial advance. If these observations 
and impressions might suggest a more 
careful survey, they would more than 
fulfill their purpose. 



PRESENT SELLING VALUES OF 
GARY REAL ESTATE. 

This is a difficult subject for any 
one, however well informed, to speak 
intelligently about. Of course, the 
"selling" value of anything is what it 
sells for in money. This depends much 
upon the buyer's personal equipment 
and knowledge, and how he is situated 
as to contact with the seller. This 
"buyer" might be the one who fur- 
nishes the purchase money, and might 
be his better equipped agent in the 
matter. Although an investor may 
have to pay more for Gary real estate 
in installments than he would in all 
cash, this far from means that he 
should not buy at all unless he has all 
cash. 

What is the rightful selling value of 
a lot or tract depends on many 
things, often different in different 
cases. Sometimes these conditions are 
not known except to the well posted 
buyer. For instance, there are sub- 
divisions in and about Gary in which 
each of perhaps a hundred scattered 
lots have been sold to some one of a 
class or nationality whose improve- 
ments and occupancy will injure in- 
stead of help any of the unsold lots. 

Again, there are many cases in some- 
what outlying localities where the buy- 
er is told there will soon be quick and 
convenient transportation, the truth or 
probability of which, often very ma- 
terial, he cannot rely on. The same is 
true of assurances of the quick coming 
of sewers, water, school facilities, etc., 
where they do not now exist. Such a 
buyer can get valuable help from some 
one of the many others than the seller, 
who knows much about such things. 



REAL ESTATE VALUES 



51 



Then there are matters that enter 
into the actual values of real estate in 
any city or locality which a buyer or 
his representative could weigh after 
seeing or otherwise knowing them. A 
residence lot between two nice resi- 
dences already built is worth more 
than a lot, even only one hundred feet 
away, the surroundings of which are 
not determined. A business lot be- 
tween a laundry and a livery stable, 
present or to be, is not worth as much 
as one between a store building and a 
bank building. 

A residence subdivision adjacent to 
an undrained marsh, freight yard, 
planing mill or a coal yard, etc., is 
less likely to produce profits for lot 
buyers than if better surrounded. 

Then again, the value of a business 
lot is somewhat effected by Avhat it 
will earn. A corner on Broadway was, 
last fail, valued at $500 a front foot 
for the reason that the buyer had 
figures on the cost of an improvement 
and rental offers from responsible ten- 
ants that would pay good income on 
the cost of the ground and building. 
Generally speaking, residence lots 
within six blocks of the business cen- 
ter of Gary can be had for about $600 
per lot and as one goes farther, for 
$500, $400, $300, etc. 

Business lots along the north two 
miles of Broadway, which is the im- 
proved, built-up portion, can be bought 
near the business center for about $300 
per foot; a half mile farther south for 
about $250 a foot, a mile and a half 
to two miles south, from $100 to $150 
a foot. In the Steel Company's plat 
there is no chance to speculate on va- 
cant property, business or residence, 
as they sell only for prompt improve- 
ment. 



As to acre tracts, there are a few 
small ones that can be obtained within 
a mile, or a mile and a half, from the 
business center for from $1,200 to 
$2,000 per acre and about a half mile 
farther away, for from $800 to $1,500 
per acre, and there are still, farther 
away, nice acre tracts of from five to 
twenty-five acres that can be bought 
from $500 to $1,000 per acre, depend- 
ing upon elevation, drainage, transpor- 
tation, schools, surroundings, etc. 

It is quite feasible for several friends 
to form a small syndicate, furnishing 
an aggregate of a few thousand dollars 
and buy a few acres at very much less 
than individual lots prices. In such 
cases, the title can be held jointly, or 
the tract divided up into individual 
holdings, or held by some one as a trus- 
tee, for all. There are, no doubt, many 
such syndicates, as well as more indi- 
viduals, who would buy acres and sub- 
divide and sell in lots, if they were 
situated to attend to the reselling and 
had the intelligence or experience to 
do it rightly. 

If the land is rightly bought and 
rightly handled, it will show a large 
percentage of profit, which profit often 
has to be divided with whoever fur- 
nishes the time, experience, advertis- 
ing, etc. If the owner of acres can- 
not make a wise selection of a man 
to retail the lots, he should keep them 
in acres and hope to resell the entire 
tract in one sale. The best and most 
desirable subdivision managers will not 
work for a commission, but feel entit- 
led to a good share of the profits and 
of the advanced values. 

Such a plan is the true theory for 
the owner if he gets the right connec- 
tion with the right man. 



52 



IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909" 




THE EMERSON 
now under roof, one of the largest and bes 

One good way for the reader to 
judge as to whether such prices as 
given above are reasonable, is to com- 
pare theiu with the prices in some city 
he knows about or can learn about 
more readily thaa about Gary. In 
making up comparisons, he can, in 
fairness to himself, and should, con- 
sider Gary's immediate future, and the 
great causes of real estate values that 
now exist there, rather than purely 
its present population, because if he 
bases it on population alone, he would 
be throi^gh before he started. By this 
is meant that Gary, in the first half of 
the year 1909 has probably not more 
than 15,000 permanent resident popu- 
lation, and there is probably no town 
of 15,000 people in the United States 
where real estate is worth as much as 
the reader himself regards it worth at 
Gary. The truer test by comparison is 
on the basis of what the reader is al- 
ready convinced will be the least im- 
mediate population of Gary (which he 
could not sensibly put down as less 
than from 30,000 to 50,000) and make 
his comparison with other cities of 
from 30,000 to 50,000 people, some- one 
or more of which he may know values 
in, such as : 



PUBLIC SCHOOL 

t in the United States. Cost about S2.0O,OOO. 

Mobile, Ala 50,000 

Montgomery, Ala 40,000 

Little Rock, Ark 50,000 

Bloomington, III 30,000 

Joliet, 111 35,000 

Quiney, III 42,000 

Eock Island, 111 38,000 

Fort Wayne, Ind 50,000 

South Bend, Ind 45,000 

Terre Haute, Ind 42,000 

Davenport, Iowa 41,000 

Saginaw, Mich 50,000 

Lincoln, Neb 50,000 

Elmira, N. Y 45,000 

Schenectady, N. Y 50,000 

Springfield, Ohio 50,000 

Altoona, Pa 45,000 

Lancaster, Pa 50,000 

York, Pa 40,000 

Dallas, Tex 50,000 

Spokane, Wash 50,000 

Wheeling, W. Va 48,000 

Green Bay, Wis 30,000 

Racine, Wis 35,000 

These population figures are stated 
on a basis of the federal census of nine 
years ago, allowing for probable in- 
crease since. 

Then, if the reader's knowledge and 
faith lead him to regard Gary as a 
much greater city soon, he can make 
his comparison of values so far as 



REAL ESTATE VALUES 



53 



kuown to him in such cities of larger 
population as follows: 

Birmingham, Ala 60,000 

Los Angeles, Cal 150,000 

Denver, Colo 150,000 

Bridgeport, Conn 90,000 

Hartford, Conn 90,000 

New Haven, Conn 130,000 

Wateroury, Conn 63,000 

Wilmington, Del 90,000 

Atlanta, Ga 100,000 

Savannah, Ga 73,000 

Evansville, Ind 70,000 

Des Moines, Iowa 70,000 

Covington, Ky 55,000 

Cambridge, Mass 100,000 

Fall River, Mass 130,000 

Lawrence, Mass 73,000 

New Bedford, Mass 74,000 

Worcester, Mass 140,000 

Portland, Me 60,000 



Grand Eapids, Mich 100,000 

Duluth, IVimn 60,000 

Manchester, N. H 65,000 

Camden, N. J 81,000 

Albany, N. Y 100,000 

Utica, N. Y 70,000 

Yonkers, N. Y 60,000 

Akron, Ohio 55,000 

Dayton, Ohio 100,000 

Youugstown, Ohio 55,000 

Erie, Pa 60,000 

Harrisburg, Pa 55,000 

Wilkesbarre, Pa 60,000 

Pawtucket, E. 1 45,000 

Charlestown, S. C 65,000 

Nashville, T'enn 95,000 

Houston, Tex 60,000 

San Antonio, Tex 75,000 

Salt Lake City, Utah 60,000 

Norfolk, Va 63,000 

Seattle, Wash 110,000 

Tacoma, Wash 55,000 




EUGENE J. BUFFINGTON. 
"The man who does things." 

President of the Indiana Steel Company that is expending a 
Hundred Million Dollars at Gary on an industrial plant "that bears 
its lesson of economy to every man who makes or sells for profit.' 



WHAT OTHERS SAY 



57 



OTHER PEOPLES' SAYINGS AND 
WRITINGS. 

At a banquet in December, 1907, 
"the United States Steel Corpora- 
tion" was the topic assigned to E. J. 
Buffiugton, president of the Indiana 
Steel Company. Mr. Buffington was 
introduced as "a man who did 
things." It had been his brain which 
had conceived the great plant now 
going up on the water front and the 
City of Gary as it now appears in the 
first subdivision. Mr. BuiSngtou said : 

"I have been asked to respond to a 
toast that calls for something to be 
said in regard to the United States 
Steel Corporation. In a technical sense 
I am responding to that without my 
credentials, because it is only in a sub- 
sidiary capacity that I represent the 
United States Steel Corporation. But, 
perhaps, in so far as the corporation's 
purposes and undertakings at Gary are 
concerned, I can give some facts. 

Is a Public Corporation. 

"The United States Steel Coi'pora- 
tion is M'hat I term a public corpora- 
tion, in the sense of its widely distrib- 
uted ownership of stock. The United 
States Steel Corporation, perhaps, has 
a larger number of stockholders than 
any other corporation in the world. It 
employs over 200,000 men in its indus- 
trial activities. Multiplying that by 
five would give us over a million peo- 
ple associated through the employment 
of labor of various kinds with the 
United States Steel Corporation. It 
feels itself a part of the public ; it 
recognizes a duty to the public ; it 
recognizes its responsibility to the 
public for a strict observance of law 
and an vmswerving adherence to the 
principles of common honesty. The 
policy of the United States Steel Cor- 
poration is along that line, and it will 



always see to it that those who have 
to do with the administration of its 
affairs stick closely to the principles of 
right and justice. Those who have to 
do with the mapping out of the policy 
to be pursued by the several subsidiary 
companies of the corporation believe in 
the strict observance of the law. They 
recognize that the only protection that 
property has is the observance of the 
law and the maintenance of the law, 
and the only way laws can be main- 
tained is through their observance. 

Why Gary Was Selected. 

"The undertaking at Gary by the 
United States Steel Corporation was 
the result of its recognition of the 
necessity to do something on a large 
scale in the West to take care of the 
rapidly growing demand for steel and 
iron products. To give you an idea 
as to the rapidity -with which the de- 
mand for those products has grown, I 
will state that in the year 1890 the 
total production of steel in the United 
States was 4,000,000 tons; in the year 
1895 that production had grown to 
6,000,000 tons ; in the year 1900 it had 
grown to 10,000,000 tons ; in the year 
1906 the United States produced 23,- 
000,000 tons of steel products. 

"Our plans for enlargement were 
first had with respect to the existing 
plants of the Illinois Steel Company, 
the principal plant being at South Chi- 
cago. Chicago possesses many of the 
essentials of manufacture on a large 
scale; but we soon saw that there was 
not suiScient elboM^ room at South Chi- 
cago for bringing forth or perfecting 
our large plans for the building of an 
additional steel plant. Hence we be- 
gan to cast our eyes around for a suit- 
able place for the location of a large 
steel plant. Our observations were con- 
fined to the shore of Lake Michigan; 
we could not afford to break ourselves 



58 



"IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1900" 



away i'roiii the transportation afforded 
bj^ the lake for our ore supplies. Our 
attention was called to the sand dunes 
in the northern part of Lake county, 
and the site attracted us. Our investi- 
gation of the depth of the water im- 
mediately in front of this land con- 
vinced us that there was possible a 
most magnificent harbor for our ship- 
ping; a sufficient depth of Avater could 
be had to float the ships of largest 
draught. We also found good railroad 
facilities in this vicinity; better, in 
some respects, than at Chicago, espe- 
cially with reference to terminal and 
transfer facilities. Therefore, we cast 
our lot in the northern part of In- 
diana. 

"The first land was bought in the 
fall of 1905 — a few hundred acres — 
and the building of the steel plant was 
begun in the spring of 1906 Avith the 
development of larger plans, more land 
was bought from time to time, until 
now our holdings amount to approxi- 
mately 9,000 acres in one continuous 
body. The plan for the first unit, it 
may be termed, for steel manufacture, 
involves the building of eight blast 
furnaces, fifty-six open-hearth fur- 
naces, accessory finishing mills, rail 
mill, plate mill, structural mill and 
mills for making bar steel. The ca- 
pacity of this first unit will be approx- 
imately 2,500,000 tons annually. That 
will be a larger output of steel than is 
made to-day by all of the plants of the 
Illinois Steel Company. That will give 
you some idea of the scope of this un- 
dertaking. 

Homes for Employes. 

"After deciding to build this steel 
plant at this site, amid this waste and 
these sand dunes we recognized at once 
the necessity of the steel corporation 
undertaking to build a place for the 
homes of its employes. Therefore we 



were forced to undertake the com- 
mencement, at least, of a town. Our 
connection with the Town of Gary 
was a necessity; no one else would 
undertake the expenditure of the capi- 
tal necessary to make the homes for 
our employes. Amid this waste and 
these sand dunes it was not to be sup- 
posed that any one would have suf- 
ficient confidence in the mere an- 
nouncement of the plan of the cor- 
poration to build a big steel plant that 
would employ eventually 15,000 men ; 
capital cannot be persuaded to invest 
in homes on a mere statement of that 
kind. Therefore the corporation had 
to acquire sufficient land not only for 
its steel plants but for the starting of 
a town. 

"The first subdivision of Gary com- 
prises about 800 acres of land, which 
has been laid off into something over 
4,000 lots. The purpose of the cor- 
poration with respect to this compara- 
tively small area is merely to give a 
sample, or endeavor to give a sample, 
of the lines along which Gary should 
be built. We were anxious to avoid 
the conditions which are usually inci- 
dent to a new community. We pur- 
pose in this first subdivision to com- 
plete it with well-paved streets and 
with a sewage system that has been de- 
signed by the best of engineers so as 
to secure the best possible sanitation 
for the community. It will be 
equipped with a water works that will 
give Gary a supply of water inferior 
to none on the lakes. The capacity of 
the water plant being constructed can 
be extended almost to an unlimited de- 
gree. It involves the construction of a 
tunnel over 15,000 feet in length, 7,000 
feet of tlie tunnel being beneath the 
waters of Lake Michigan, and going 
out to a depth that will insure as pure 
water as can be obtained from that 
source. 



WHAT OTHERS SAY 59 

Great Public Utilities. CONTRACTS FOR STEEL CARS. 



"The gas works will have a capacity 
from the start to serve a population of 
over 25,000 people. All these public 
utilities are being provided by a sub- 
sidiary company of the United States 
Steel Corporation under franchises ob- 
tained in the regular way from the 
Town Trustees. In seeking these fran- 
chises we represented that they could 
be safely entrusted to us and that the 
Corporation did not seek them merely 
for the profits which may be made out 
of them. They will be administered in 
the best interests of the community, be- 
cause by so doing the Corporation will 
be best administering its own inter- 
ests. AA^e are to depend for our profits 
upon the steel business. AVe know more 
about the steel business than we do 
about running a town. AVe expect the 
people in this community to show us 
how to run a town. AVe shall gladly 
welcome the day when all the affairs 
of Gary can be taken over by an or- 
ganization, in due course of law, with 
no attempted direction by the corpora- 
tion. There is nothing paternalistic in 
the undertaking of the corporation at 
Gary. The corporation has built in 
Gary at the present time over 500 
dwelling houses. Those houses are in- 
tended for its employes. 

"The plan adopted by the corpora- 
tion for offering its residence property 
for sale in the first subdivision of Gary 
prevents absolutely the property from 
f)assing into the hands of speculators. 
AVe sell no piece of property within 
the first subdivision of Gary excepting 
to those who are prepared and willing 
to at once put up suitable buildings of 
an agreed character ; so that there is 
no opportunity in the first subdivision 
of Gary for the speculators to get hold 
of property and hold it for their per- 
sonal advantage and disadvantage of 
the community." 



In an article about the opening of 
the first furnace at Gary, the Chicago 
Record-Herald early in the year 1909 
says : 

At present a large amount of steel 
rail and steel car business is under ne- 
gotiation. Recent orders for cars are 
500 box cars and 300 steel hoppers 
placed by the Lackawana with the 
American Car and Foundry Company 
and a contract for 300 steel under 
frame cars placed by a southern road 
with the Standard Steel Car Company. 

In structural steel the most impor- 
tant recent contract was that for 11,- 
000 tons for the new C'ity Hall building 
in Chicago, the American Bridge Com- 
pany being the successful bidder. Sev- 
ei'al other contracts for small amounts 
were reported during the week. Dur- 
ing the year the American Bridge 
Company, the Steel Corporation's 
structural steel subsidiary, has deliv- 
ered about 350,000 tons of material and 
will carry orders for about 200,000 tons 
over into next year. The various in- 
dependent interests have turned out 
about 800,000 tons of structural ma- 
terial during the year. During a large 
part of the year they were hunting for 
business actively and took it at lower 
prices than the corporation would ccm- 
sider. 



In the January, 1909, issue of "Iron 
Age" of New York, probably the lead- 
ing journal in iron and steel in Amer- 
ica, is a review of the Gary mills, show- 
ing how they are regarded in the steel 
industr}'. A part of the article is as 
follows : 

"The Greatest Steel Plant in the 
World." 

Since the organization of the Indiana 
Steel Company as a constituent inter- 



60 



"IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909" 



est of the United States Steel Corpora- 
tion in January, 1906, and the subse- 
quent announcement of its plans for 
the building of a steel plant of unpre- 
cedented size at Gary, Ind., this under- 
taking has eomuianded the interest and 
attention of the entire industrial 
world. Nor is this due alone to the 
magnificence of the scale upon which 
the work was planned ; for it was 
easily recognized that an unprece- 
dented opportunity would be here af- 
forded for a concentration of the most 
modern methods and appliances for 
making steel from the ore to the fin- 
ished product. 

The Acme of Achievement. 

Projected under conditions unhamp- 
ered by the limitations of capital and 
favored by the acquisition of an ade- 
quate site, it was expected — and with 
good reason — that the Gary plant when 
completed would represent in all of its 
units, individually and collectively, the 
acme of achievement in this branch of 
the world's industries. And as the 
plans have developed and taken form 
in construction, no doubt remains that 
these expectations are in the end to be 
realized in the fullest degree. The op- 
portunity of designing a complete steel 
making plant of such size has never 
before presented itself to engineers ; 
nor indeed can conditions better suited 
to successful accomplishment be easily 
conceived. The history of steel plant 
construction, in this and other coun- 
tries, has been, generally speaking, one 
of evohxtion from more or less modest 
beginning. 

For Future Development. 

First plans for such enterprises usu- 
ally make only imperfect or inadequate 
provision for future growth and exten- 
sion, with the result that there are 
lacking the perfect symmetry and com- 



plete co-ordination of parts which are 
only possible when ultimate ends are 
in the view from the beginning. Here, 
however, is a great, well balanced 
plant, which will finally comprise a 
S3'stem of component units fitted to- 
gether iu a related plan calculated to 
facilitate, at every stage, the produc- 
tion of steel, and to secure the maxi- 
mum of economy in the cost of produc- 
ing it. 



AS VIEWED BY THE ENGINEERS. 



Magnitude One of Striking Features 
of the Plant — Thoroughly Modern. 



Gassier 's Magazine, one of the lead- 
ing engineering magazines of the 
world, contains an authoritative ac- 
count of the new steel plant in Gary. 
The article was written by a member 
of the editorial stafif of the publication 
and besides presenting his impressions 
on the great plant the writer gives an 
expert description of its construction. 

For more than tM'o years past the 
attention of the civilized Avorld has 
been directed towards Gary, Ind., 
Avhere an achievement uniciue in the 
annals of industrial history is at pres- 
ent in process of realization. Upon the 
shifting sand dunes of Northern In- 
diana, at a point where the Grand 
Calumet flows into Lake Michigan, 
twenty-three miles east of Chicago, 
there are being built, in record time, a 
city, a harbor and enormous steel 
works, the largest of their kind in the 
world. This is all in behalf of one 
corporation, the Indiana Steel Com- 
pany, which has secured here a site 
of 9,000 acres, with a lake frontage of 
one and three-quarter miles, on which 
to erect both the mills and a residence 
city for its employes. 



A PEN PICTURE 



61 



Impressed with Magnitude. 

Upon a visitor entering tlie plant, 
the first and overwhelming impression 
is that of magnitude ; the second, re- 
sulting from close inspection, is of com- 
pleteness coupled with simplicity; the 
third and most interesting concerns the 
practical elimination of waste. Prom 
these factors, as a natural resultant, 
comes "economy," the much-sought 
necessity of the present industrial 
world. Plere it has been worked out 
with mathematical certainty. 

During a decade or two past the 
relative cost of producing iron and 
steel, as compared with the constantlj^ 
increasing scales of wages paid to 
worlimen, has been reduced largely 
through the substitution, first, of me- 
cliauical appliances for manual labor 
and then of improved macliinery and 
methods. This eliange has been and is 
still taking place all along the line, 
from tlie stripping and removal of ore 
beds by steam shovels to the loading 
of the finished rails, plates or struc- 
tural parts on cars ready for shipment. 
At every stage of the process wliere 
new apparatus is used, if the machin- 
ery has been wisely designed, properly 
installed and efficiently operated, costs 
have been proportionately reduced and 
a final cheaper — usually better — prod- 
uct made possible. 

Methods for Utilizing- Waste. 

Of late, however, there have come 
about still more important require- 
ments in steel mill practice, due both 
to improved metallurgical processes 
and the necessity of supplementing 
these by methods for utilizing the in- 
evitable waste, wliich, consequently, is 
fast disappeai'ing as "waste" and re- 
appearing as "by-products." 

For the benefit of those wlio have no 
intimate knowledge of the manufacture 
of steel it may be well to state, in ex- 



planation of wliat follows, sometliing 
of the first steps of the process. When 
pig-iron is to be made, coke, ore and 
limestone are put in layers in the blast 
furnaces and then the fires are lighted. 
A powerful blast of heated air is sent 
through tlie burning mass, in order to 
generate the intense heat necessary to 
melt the ore and the limestone, or 
"fiux, " into a molten mass. In tlie 
burning of the coke under a terrific 
forced draught it is impossible to have 
consumed all of the heat energy in tlie 
coke. 



STILL ANOTHER PEN 

PICTURE OF GARY 



In Harper's Weekly of July 4, 1908, 
"Gary, the City That Rose From tlie 
Sand Waste," is made the subject of 
an appreciative article by John Kim- 
berly Mumford. Space will not permit 
of tlie publication of the article entire, 
notwithstanding it is well worth read- 
ing. Excerpts follow : 

Three years ago the wild duck used 
to flock in the lazy reaches of back- 
water all about the sluggish bends of 
the Grand Calumet, and foxes ran in 
the scrub that thinly clothed the sand 
hills. TAventy-six miles southeast of 
Chicago the Calumet Hunting Club had 
its rude biit comfortable huts topping 
the barren rise above the lake shore. 
Overworked lawyers and doctors used 
to go down from Chicago on Saturday 
night to fish and hunt and swap lies 
through the Sabbath day, and get 
braced up for Monday. It was out of 
the world. Except for the surf and 
the roaring wind and the periodical 
bang of the double-barrel it was a 
silent realm down there. Nature was 
all alone. 

To-day — well, the palace of Aladdin 
was a hasheesh-dreamer's fantasy. 



62 



"IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909" 



The tower of Babel was a piece of 
"jerry" work, because it hadn't like 
the Steel Corporation, a bunch of poly- 
glot foremen and a billion and a half 
of money back of it. To-day the Grand 
Calumet has been moved into a new 
channel back from the storm-thrashed 
coast, and titanic steam shovels have 
sliced away the sand dunes and tossed 
them into the hollows that Avere left, 
to make foundation for mills and shops 
and offices, and all the manifold build- 
ings that belong- by rights to one of 
the most extraordinary industrial 
plants on earth. 

Long piers grow out into the lake by 
magic and between them big dredges 
began gnawing their way inshore. To- 
day a ship canal 250 feet wide and 25 
feet deep extends a mile inland and 
is still lengthening, to end in a turn- 
ing-basin where the lake ore-vessels 
can swing around and put their bull 
noses out to sea again. All along the 
west side of it runs a concrete wall big 
enough to bastion a world, and on it 
tower the black giants they call "un- 
loaders," with lean arms that reach 
down and snatch the cargo out of the 
bowels of a ship in jig-time. Back of 
these, au endless ore-yard, also of con- 
crete, where mountains can be heaped 
to await the day when the hot, hungry 
niouths of the furnaces shall claim 
them. Ore-bridges, raising their gaunt 
skeletons into the sky, bins, dumps, 
cars, obeying the click of an electrical 
button. Huge, upright cylindrical 
stoves, gas-consumers, conical blast 
furnaces, rows of stacks like mammoth 
sticks of licorice poked up into the face 
of heaven ; acres upon acres of open- 
hearth buildings, rail-mills, machine- 
shops, foundries, pumping-stations, 
bloom-mills, billet-mills, ladles, blow- 
ers, conduits, pipes, storage-houses, 
blacksmith-shops, and what not, all of 
steel and brick, brick and steel, with 
their feet set solid in concrete that 



goes down to the wet sand below the 
level of Lake Michigan. And every- 
wliere are strewn the rubble and ruin 
left from prodigious construction. 



The vice-president of the Indiana 
Steel Company said there were three 
reasons for building Gary, none of 
them sentimental. First, it is a lake 
port, or will be ; second, its railroad 
facilities for shipment will be perfect ; 
third, it will in a short time be the cen- 
ter of steel consumption, for that cen- 
ter, though now a little farther east, 
is moving west more rapidly than the 
center of population, which is now just 
south of Chicago. The curving south 
shore of Lake Michigan Avithin the 
next generation will be a black, re- 
A'crberant arc of steel-mills, the great- 
est producing center in the world, and 
as Ave go now to look in wonder at the 
grass-groAvn sites of vanished cities in 
the oil regions, so our grandchildren 
may go some day to pick Avild flowers 
from AA^iat in this year of grace are 
the noisy and smoke-laden streets of 
Pittsburg. Who can tell ? 



The Land of Opportunity. 

A month later the Avriter of the above 
has, in Harper's AVeekly, an important 
intervieAv Avith Judge E. H. Gary. 

In the course of an intervieAA^, Judge 
Gary tells of the policy of the Steel 
Corporation in so straightforAvard a 
way that the intervicAv is well Avorth 
the reading by every employe of the 
Steel Corporation and by all others 
Avho have been brought into contact 
Avith it. The most pertinent extracts 
are given beloAV : 



THE LAND OF OPPORTUNITY. 



63 



"There is a great awakening in this 
country with relation to better con- 
duct, more decency, more honesty, 
more responsibility — by everybody, to 
everybody. 

"It doesn't make an atom of differ- 
ence who brought it about. It's here. 
Mark my words, that is the keynote of 
the American situation to-day. 

"There has been deceit, there has 
been over-reaching, there have been 
errors of kinds innumerable, but from 
this time forward there is going to be 
more fairness and a lot more candor 
and rectitude in the transaction of 
business. 

"Any man who says he is not in- 
fluenced by selfish inotives in his deal- 
ings is, of course, a hypocrite. We all 
know better ; but there is a host of 
men who can appreciate a policy of 
honesty, and every sane man sees that 
such a policy must be scrupulously fol- 
lowed. And this idea should extend 
until it prevails in all dealings and in 
the management of all corporations. It 
is in the air. The tendency of business 
henceforth will be to respect the pub- 
lic, and the man who antagonizes that 
policy will be ground out sooner or 
later." 

This declaration was made to me the 
other day by Judge Elbert H. Gary, 
chairman of the United States Steel 
Corporation. 



"When the Steel Trust talks out from 
the diaphragm there is no man in 
America, whether he is his own boss 
or whether he works on a salary, but 
can afford to sit up and pay attention, 
because it means something to every 
individual. 

Steel with its billion of money ; Steel 
with its myriad glowing furnaces, its 



thundering mills, and its smokestacks 
thick as stalks in a cornfield ; Steel, 
with its thousands upon thousands of 
miles of ore land and coal land and 
gas land ; Steel, with its endless rail- 
ways and its fleet of vessels ; Steel, 
with its SAvarming populations of work- 
men and its trade lines penetrating 
every business and every corner of the 
world, has become the touchstone of 
our fortunes and the barometer of our 
condition. 

They used to say "As New York 
goes so goes the Union." Now they 
say that as Steel goes so goes the whole 
mighty current of American business. 
We live and work in steel buildings, 
we ride in steel ears and steel ships, 
our intercourse is over steel wires — we 
are encompassed and entwined and 
coimected, transported, and finally en- 
tombed by steel. We are Steel and 
Steel is us. 

The very form and embodiment of 
the trust idea — the Simon-pure essence 
of corporation in its highest potency — 
is the Steel Trust. Hailed at its birth 
by the conservative as a monstrosity, 
and decried as an impertinence greater 
than Lucifer's, the Steel Trust has 
been a huge disappointment to many. 
It was a machine too cumbersome to 
work, they said; a ship too heavy to 
float, an annihilator of personal rights 
and a foe to Honest Labor. But it is 
still here and growing. It has raised 
wages and reduced prices. It has 
averted one panic and steadied the 
country through another, and it pos- 
sesses a long arm and a sturdy voice. 

It stands to reason, therefore, that 
what the Steel Corporation, through 
its authorized spokesman, has to say in 
this most important stage of business 
recovery is to be taken, in a way, as 
the watchword of the times. 




JUDGE ELBERT H. GARY 

the wonderful organizer and constructive genius. President of the Executive Board of the 
United States Steel Company. 



A MODERN INDUSTRIAL CITY 



67 



FROM THE CHICAGO ECONOMIST 
FINANCIAL EDITORIAL, DECEM- 
BER 5, 1908. 

The drift and the opinion of the Cap- 
tains of Industry as to the future may 
be inferred from the developments at 
Gary and the plans that have been 
adopted to be worked out later on. 
Enough has been said in regard to this 
new field of the United States Steel 
Corporation to indicate in a way the 
magnitude of the undertaking, but 
Chicago does not yet appreciate what 
is happening close to its doors, and 
still less does the rest of the world 
grasp the magnitude of the project. 
It sounds like exaggeration to say that 
engagements already entered into con- 
template the employment of 75,000 
men, and that a population there of 
250,000 in the near future is a con- 
servative estimate, but when such in- 
formation comes from cautioxis men, 
familiar with what is going on, one 
must accept the statements with toler- 
ance at least. 

A MODERN INDUSTRIAL CITY. 

"American Industries," a publica- 
tion of high standing in its particular 
field, devotes several pages of its De- 
cember, 1908, issue to Gary. It was 
written by G. Wilfred Pearce, civil 
engineer. Cogent extracts from Mr. 
Pearce 's article, which is entitled 
"Gary: A Modern Industrial City," 
are given below. 

The works are to be operated by the 
Indiana Steel Company. As planned, 
the ultimate annual output of pig iron 
from Gary will be 3,000,000 tons. This 
vast amount is exactly one-half of the 
world's output fifty years ago. In 
1857 the United States made 1,000,000 
tons of pig iron. This year's output 
will be about 25,000,000 tons. Fifty 



years ago the largest cargo of iron ore 
taken down the Great Lakes was 340 
tons, and pig iron, Foundry No. 2, 
sold at $31. Better iron is sold to-day 
at $16. 

Fifty years ago the learned Sir 
Lowthian Bell, one of the great iron- 
masters of Great Britain, gave it for 
his opinion that the Lake Superior iron 
ore deposits would not be a factor of 
importance in less than a century. 
This season's downtake of iron ores 
from Great Lake ports will aggregate 
40,000,000 tons, which is within 8,000,- 
000 tons of the total export and import 
tonnage of the ports of London and 
Liverpool. Gary is planned in a log- 
ical way to provide due expansion for 
the Steel Corporation's requirements. 
The nation's steel wants double once 
in seven years. Since the United States 
Steel Corporation was organized, in 
1901, it has appropriated the stupen- 
dous amount of almost $100,000,000 for 
ordinary maintenance and repairs, and 
for new construction, extraordinary 
replacement and real estate. 



The Steel Corporation designs to ex- 
pend $75,000,000 in all ways at Gary. 
But this sum is being put out in what 
might be termed fixed units of con- 
sti'uction both at the works and in the 
residential locality. About 110,000 
tons of constructural steel have thus 
far been used in structures, of which 
14,000 tons are in the open-hearth 
building. The fire brick, in nine-inch 
equivalents, so far, number 100,000,- 
000. In the frames of shops completed 
18,000,000 building brick have, been 
set. 

When Gary makes 3,000,000 tons of 
pig iron a year, something more than 
6,000,000 tons of ore will be required, 
and to that end, suction dredges are 
making a long and deep channel from 
the lake to a dock one and one-half 



68 



"IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909' 



miles loug and 250 feet wide, which will 
be ready for ships iu AjDril. There is 
a logical arrangement of the Avorks Ly 
which the products move from docks 
and flux and fuel receptacles to the 
blast furnaces and thence to the open- 
hearth steel works, and so on by the 
shortest line to the mills for semi-fin- 
ished and finished products. 

All buildings are lofty and have am- 
ple open space on all sides. The heat- 
ing and ventilation systems are as good 
as in the most costly hotels in the great 
cities. In the foundry and machine 
shops the window space is the double 
of the sizes used until recently in mill 
construction. The sanitary plumbing 
is of the best, and the iDotable water is 
supplied from a long intake from the 
lake which goes out so far that the 
water is as pure as any on earth. The 
ore unloaders can discharge 97 per 
cent, of a ship's cargo in a few hours 
and convey the ore to the mixing bins 
with the speed of a railroad train. 



As comf)ared with methods of work- 
ing pig iron and steel plants thirty 
years ago, the 20,000 hands that will 
be employed at Gary, when plans shall 
have been completed, will do more 
work than 100,000 hands working 
under the anticiuated methods, still 
largely employed in a number of East- 
ern plants. 

Ore, iron and steel finished products 
in those trades originate immense ton- 
nages. "Within five years the annual 
tonnage at Gary Avill attain the colos- 
sal amount of 14,000,000 tons a year. 
The years are not far away when by 
the dredging of the Grand Calumet 
River that courses near the mills at 
Gary, vessels drawing up to fourteen 
feet Avill be able to ply between Gary 
and Mississippi River points, via the 
Chicago Main Drainage Canal. 

The Georgian Bay Canal undertak- 
ing by Canada, soon to be begun, will 
give Gary the opportunity for sending 
ships without breaking bulk direct 
from her docks to any port in Europe 
or Asia. All existing grade crossings 
in Gary are to be abolished and a fine 
Union Railroad Station is to be built. 




THE"F1EST STEP IN THE PRODUCTION OF GARY'S POWER. 

From the tops of the blast furnaces the waste gases are blown down into the^'dast catchers shown here, which 
remove the heavier impurities. Of these the ore dust is saved and re-smelted. The gas is treated to three further 
processes. 



THE BELT LINE FACTOR 



71 



The Chicago Tribune Gives Details of 
Road Coming from Milwaukee. 



Plans of the greatest commercial im- 
portance to Chicago and to the manu- 
facturing district of which this city is 
the center became public yesterday 
through an announcement from St. 
Louis that control of the Chicago, Mil- 
waukee and Cary Railway had been 
practically secured by the St. Louis 
Union Trust Company. Arrangements 
also have been made, it is said, where- 
by $10,000,000 is to be expended on the 
property to complete the outer belt 
line around Chicago. When completed 
the road will extend from Milwaukee 
to Gary, a distance of 251 miles, en- 
circling Chicago at a radius of about 
fifty miles. 

The present line from Rockford, 111., 
to Momence, 111., 125 miles long, is to 
be extended at once from Momence to 
Gary, twenty-six miles, at a cost of 
$2,225,000. The extension from Rock- 
ford north to Milwaukee 100 miles will 
cost $6,595,000, and a new line is to be 
built from Aurora to Joliet twenty- 
two miles at a cost of $1,180,000. Ttie 
road now uses the tracks of the Elgin, 
Joliet & Eastern Railway between 
these points. 

Avoid Chicago Congestion. 

Besides affording facilities for the 
handling of freight between its term- 
inals, including the new steel town, 
the road possesses great possibilities 
for the handling of through freight 
from the western to the eastern roads 
along the line of least resistance, avoid- 
ing the rapidly increasing congestion 
incident to the Chicago terminals. 

Milwaukee last year handled 96,- 
000,000 tons of freight in and out by 
means of only two railroads. Besides 
the Wisconsin city and Gary, the road 
passes through several important man- 
ufacturing cities, including Aurora, 
Joliet, Dekalb, Janesville and Beloit. 



THE CONSUMPTION OF STEEL. 

Over a year ago a writer, among 
those most informed as to Gary, wrote : 

The consumption of steel doubles 
once in seven years ; the larger degree 
of growth in the development of the 
country is in sections tributary to Chi- 
cago and St. Louis. Gary is only 123 
miles from the center of the country's 
population, and the trend of that cen- 
ter is toward that town. The site has 
an exceptionally good location right 
on Lake Michigan, and the water front 
of six and one-half miles is ample for 
dock requirements for many years 
ahead. 

Three-fourths of the estimated quan- 
tity of iron ore at the Upper Lakes is 
controlled by the Steel Corporation, 
and the estimated amount is sufficient 
to endure through a century. The dis- 
tance saved between upper lake ports 
and Gary as compared with Lake Erie 
ports and the transfer to rail for the 
long haul to the Pittsburg district 
gives the Steel Corporation's boats, 
some of which carry 12,000 to 13,000 
tons of iron ore, many more trips in a 
season. 

Gary should be regarded as an im- 
portant unit in the Steel Corporation's 
sagacious plans for increasing produc- 
tion in a degree commensurate with the 
growths of the markets and the trend 
of the development of the Central West. 
More than one-half the nation's pro- 
duction of steel is taken by the rail- 
road interests, and Gary is almost in 
the heart of the section which will ex- 
hibit the largest degree of increase in 
trackage within a decade. Hence there 
is what might be termed enough local 
business to support all the plants now 
planned for Gary. 

Iron ore and fuel will be massed at 
Gary during the early summer of the 
coming year, and by August or Septem- 
ber the blast furnaces will be at work, 



72 



"IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909' 



and immediately thereafter the open- 
hearth furnaces Avill be charged. By 
January, 1909, Gary will be an import- 
ant factor in the steel trades, and from 
then onward other metal working in- 
dustries will be attracted thereto. 



ITEMS. 

The principal residential streets are 
named for the original thirteen states 
and for presidents of the United States. 
In the heart of that district is the site 
for a park which is to be beautified 
as soon as possible. In the matter of 
churches, the Steel Corporatiou tells 
the clergy and trustees to pick their 
lot, and when that is done the corpora- 
tion donates the land and makes a con- 
tribution to the building fund. The 
same is the case with relation to a pro- 
posed structure for the Young Men's 
Christian Association. 

There is to be a fine park at the lake 
front with a bandstand and an amuse- 
ment hall, and there is a rumor that a 
fine library is to be built by a gentle- 
man of prominence in the Steel Cor- 
poration. There is plenty of good 
building ground owned by the corpora- 
tion and designed for sale to employes 
at a very snuill return upon cost. 

A lot of land was sold to a Chicago 
brewer just outside the corporation's 
residential tract the other day for $14,- 
000, which a year ago Avas sold for 
$800. 

' It is understood by the iron and steel 
trade workers that Gary is to be what 
they term "an all star town," that is, 
the working men are to be picked, so- 
ber, energetic and reliable men who 
know how to get on, and who appre- 
ciate the fact that north, south, east 
and west, the United States Steel Cor- 
poration has ahvays stood for "a 



square deal" for every man, and that 
promotion goes for merit. These facts 
are not widely knoAvn outside the steel 
trades, yet it is the explanation of why 
thousands of the corporation's em- 
ployes are inspired by ambition to get 
upward in the service, as they see ev- 
ery day fellow workers earning very 
large incomes who a -few years ago 
were day laborers or clerks in minor 
capacities. It is this attitude toward 
employes that is such a great factor in 
the earnings of the Steel Coi'poration. 



RAYMOND TELLS STORY OF GARY 

(Written in Oct., 1908.) 

Celebrated Correspondent of the Chi- 
cago Tribune Writes of Magic 
City of Steel. 

NO SIGN OF MUSHROOM GROWTH 

Astounded Over Vast Expenditures at 

Mills Before Any Returns Can 

Be Made. 

Just think ■what it means in a com- 
mercial way to spend $100,000,000 with- 
in a raduis of ten miles and within a 
period of less than ten years. That is 
Avhat the United States Steel Corpora- 
tion has begun to do in this vicinity, 
and no man can estimate the effect on 
business and politics in northern In- 
diana, and even over the line between 
Illinois and Michigan. 

First of all, as to tlie commercial 
transformation which has been effect- 
ed in this land of sand mountains, teal 
duck, and pine bax'rens. There could 
not be a more unpromising field than 
this old bed of Lake Michigan for a 
demonstration of the unlimited power 
of great capital to make a Avilderness 
blossom like an American beauty, and 
by giving employment to many thou- 



THE STORY OF GARY 



73 



sands of men to add to the comfort of 
the community. 

How many people of Chicago linew 
wliat was meant wlien the great Steel 
Corporation announced that it proposed 
to secure possession of nine miles of 
Avater frontage on the southern shore 
of Lake Michigan, and dump ovit on the 
sand dune country $40,000,000 before 
it should receive a cent in return or a 
single ounce of manufactured steel? 

City Grows Up in a Night. 

Do many people understand that to- 
day, but a little over two years after 
the ground was broken in one of the 
most forbidding wildernesses of the 
country, where the lake shore sand 
stings the face and the Calumet 
swamps entrap the feet, there are now 
5,000 men at work and $250,000 in 
cash at the least estimate is distributed 
evei-y month? AVords like "astonish- 
ing," " marvelous, " " astounding, ' ' and 
"miraculous" seem entirely trite in 
describing the results reached by the 
preliminary millions already spent. 

A city has grown up in the night. It 
is not a mushroom village with miles 
of temporary shacks and drink parlors, 
such as we were accustomed to see in 
the far west during the boom times, 
but a real city, with miles of well 
paved streets, water supply, sewerage, 
a bustling daily paper, banks, hotels, 
street cars, and substantial buildings of 
brick and stone constructed with heavy 
foundations to permit an extension up- 
Avard in the near days to come. 

liere is a city where there are not 
homes enough to shelter the thousands 
of prosperous workmen, and every 
night and morning long trains pull 
them to and from their work, many 
of their homes being in South Chicago, 
Englewood, and intermediate towns. 
There are other industrial centers in 
northwestern Indiana, like Whiting, 
Indiana Harbor and Hammond, but 



Gary is the newest and most astound- 
ing of them all. 

Gary's Population 12,000. 

I went there to look up certain new 
political conditions, but the commer- 
cial and industrial surprises are so 
great they must be told about before 
the political revolution of the county 
and state can be appreciated. 

Gary wasn't even on the map four 
years ago, and yet the residents of the 
place now put its population at 12,000. 
That seems an overestimate of the peo- 
ple actually living there, for one can- 
not forget tlie throngs of workmen on 
the long trains of the Lake Shore, Wa- 
bash, Baltimore and Ohio and Pennsyl- 
vania lines. 

That there are 5,000 men actually at 
labor in the construction work of the 
great steel works is undeniable, with 
others employed in building up the 
town. Allowing for a small proportion 
of women and children — this is a man's 
town as yet — a population figure of 12,- 
000 is not excessive if applied to all 
those who work or sleep in the new 
city. 

These two years have been devoted 
to building the plant of the steel com- 
pany, to erection of business blocks, 
and to the creation of a section of ar- 
tistic suburban residences which are 
even now occupied by the superintend- 
ents and heads of departments, who 
must be on the ground early and late, 
while the workmen within half an 
hour can reach the Chicago limits. 

Shows Stupendous Undertaking. 

p]ven a few hours devoted to a rapid 
scurry through the new plant will 
show the stupendous character of the 
undertaking. It would be easy to pile 
up figures of lumdred tons cranes, of 
a mountain of 400,000 tons of iron ore 
now on the ground, of giant stacks and 



74 



'IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909" 



imposing dress parades of gas engines 
and electric motors, but the main facts 
are quite enough. 

In the first place, the United States 
Steel Company fo^ind by the reports 
of its mathematicians that there was a 
point where the transportation cost of 
fuel and machinery met that of raw 
material, and wliere this common point 
was adjusted to freight rates on the 
finished product. This place seemed 
to be somewhere on the southern coast 
of Lake Michigan, where there was 
water carriage for the bulky ore, easy 
access to coal and coke, and a natural 
distx'ibution for the product. 

Chicago was bai-red because of the 
prohibitive cost of the land for the 
plant. On the southern shore of Lake 
Michigan, where the northwest wind 
for centuries had piled up the sand 
back to the swamps and out into the 
lake, and where the old great river 
which used to empty Lake Michigan 
into the Mississippi has almost been 
forgotten, a place was found where 
land was cheap, where every great 
tnink line could be tapped, and where 
water transportation from the Lake 
Superior iron mines was at hand. 

Plant Will Lead World. 

Gary, named after the master 
mind of the steel trust, was therefore 
conceived and the vast plant formulat- 
ed. It involved, as I have said, an ex- 
penditure of $100,000,000 in lands, 
buildings and machinery. The result 
will be a steel plant with the greatest 
producing power in the world. 

It is literally true that the United 
States Steel Corporation is planning to 
spend the vast sura of $100,000,000 on 
its plant alone and that it will paj out 
$40,000,000 before it makes a pound of 
steel. 

Through the courtesy of W. P. Glea- 
son, the superintendent of the con- 



cern, I was enabled to take a running 
jump through the plant. A carriage 
will take one into the center of a 
great network of railroad tracks and 
strangely shaped buildings, with their 
fantastic domes and stacks, but from 
that point one nmst be prepared for a 
leg racking trip over miles of cinder 
plazas, acres of lake sand, and vast 
areas of monster buildings, some of 
them now ready for the steel making. 



Ore Slip of Big Capacity. 

There is a steamship slip where the 
ore boats from Lake Superior dump 
10,000 tons at a time of the red prod- 
uct of the ranges. We cross the aban- 
doned main line of the Baltimore & 
Ohio and learn that this trunk road 
with the Lake Shore was obliged to 
divert its main right of way to make 
room for the steel monster. 

And this town of Gary is the most 
wonderful thing of all. The steel trust 
has wisely avoided all appearances of 
paternalism. The Pullman experiment 
has not been repeated. Gary is an in- 
dependent municipality in every sense 
of the term. Land was acquired from 
the trust, but except as to certain lim- 
itations regartling immediate building, 
it is free to any man who has the price 
of purchase. 

Spirit of Commercialism. 

In my short stop in the town I was 
accosted by one man who wanted to 
sell me a lot and another who insisted 
I should take a Avhole block. What 
appearance of prosperity there was 
about me, I cannot conceive, but my 
second friend, who was redheaded and 
a hastier, insisted there was no stroller 
on the streets of Gary who did not 
want to buy a lot or a dozen of them, 
and he kept at my heels like a South 



THE STORY OF GARY 



75 



Clark street old clo' man long after 
I had disdainfully denied even the sus- 
picion of capitalism. 

Gary has a main street many miles 
long, on which there is a trolley line 
rumiing betAveen vitrified brick pave- 
ments from the Pennsylvania station, 
which is well out of town, up to the 
"works" themselves. As one gets up- 
town there is a real city. 

There are substantial banks and ho- 
tels, a rich variety of merchandise 
shops, and full preparation for a city 
of 50,000 people, which the inhabitants 
think certain in the next year or two. 

There are dei^artment stores, restau- 
rants, pharmacies, gin mills, book 
stores, offices of physicians and law- 
yers, undertaking shops, and all the 
outward evidences of civic prosperity. 

"Working- Force of 15,000. 

When the plans of the steel trust are 
finally accomplished there will be a 
permanent working force of 15,000, 
the men to be put at work in subsi- 
diary concerns like the American 
Bridge Company, which are already 
preparing to locate here. 

At the present time not a furnace is 
in operation. The foundry will open in 
a few days, not for commercial work 
but merely to make castings for the 
plant itself. There are now, as I have 
explained, 5,000 men engaged in the 
construction work exclusively. 

About 1,000 of these are employed 
on the interior railroad system in de- 
livering material and machinery. Of 
the other 4,000 over half are picked 
employes of the company engaged in 
installing the machinery. They will 
be permanent residents. 

A construction force equally as large 
as that at present Avill be required for 



the next two to five years. Meanwhile 
one unit after another of the mills will 
be put in operation, some of them be 
ginning this winter, so that Gary will 
have a working force of 10,000 men 
long before it can provide them with 
cheap homes enough for their daily 
habitation. 



MAGNITUDE MOST STRIKING. 



0. A. Tupper, Writing of Gary Mills in 

"Industrial Progress" Makes 

This Comment on Them. 



Still another view of the Gary mills 
from the technical side is given in a 
current number of "Industrial Prog- 
ress," by an article written by C. A. 
Tupper, representing the Allis-Chal- 
mers company. In the introduction to 
his article, which covers several pages 
of the magazine, Mr. Tupper says : 

"For more than two years past 
the attention of the civilized world 
has been directed towards Gary, Ind., 
where an achievement unique in the 
annals of industial history is at pres- 
ent in process of realization. Upon 
the shifting sand dunes of northern 
Indiana, at a point where the Grand 
Calumet flows into Lake Michigan, 23. 
miles east of Chicago, there are being 
built in record time, a city, a harbor 
and enormous steel works, of which 
the last named are the largest of their 
kind in the world. This is all in behalf 
of one corporation, the Indiana Steel 
Company, which has secured here a 
site of 9,000 acres, on which to erect 
both the mills and a residence city for 
its employes. 



76 



■IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909" 



Overwhelming Magnitude. 

"Upon a visitor entering the plant, 
the first and overwhelming impression 
is that of magnitude ; the second, re- 
sulting from close inspection, is of 
completeness coupled with simplicity; 
the third and most interesting con- 
cerns the practical elimination of 
waste. From these factors, as a nat- 
ural resultant, comes 'economy,' the 
much-sought necessity of the present 
industrial world. Here it has been 
worked out with mathematical cer- 
tainty. 

"Dviring a decade or two past the 
relative cost of producing iron and 
steel as compared with the constantlj^ 
increasing scales of wages paid to 
workmen, has been reduced largely 
through the substitution, first, of me- 
chanical appliances for manual labor 
and then of improved machinery and 
methods. 



waste — which, consequently, is fast 
disappearing as 'waste' and reappear- 
ing as "by-products.' " 





^ 


\ 




/ %• 


A 71 -vs 


v^ 


y Y.=i\v 


$%r-^ *^ — II>'^5=: 






1 ;pv\' 


rSii^ ^I^S^^^-.-^-'^^^.:^^ 



A recent editorial in the Chicago 
Daily Ncavs says : 

Chicago as an Iron and Steel Center. 



Designed to Lower Cost. 

' ' This change has been and is still tak- 
ing place all along the line, from the 
stripping and removal of ore beds by 
steam shovels to the loading of the 
finished rails, plates or structural parts 
on cars ready for shipment. At every 
stage of the process, where new ap- 
paratus is used, if the machinery has 
been wisely designed, properly in-- 
stalled and efficiently operated, costs 
have been proportionately reduced and 
a final cheaper — usually better — prod- 
uct made possible. 

"Of late, however, there have come 
about still more important refinements 
in steel mill practice, due both to im- 
proved metallurgical processes and to 
the necessity of supplementing these 
bv methods for utilizing the inevitable 



Pittsburg is today the great iron 
and steel center of the country, but 
there are signs that Pittsburg's su- 
premacy in this respect must pass to 
the industrial area of which Chicago 
is the center. The Pennsylvania city is 
situated amid great coal fields. In for- 
mer years iron ore was mined in its 
vicinity in large quantities, but now 
the ore used by its mills in the manu- 
facture of iron and steel is drawn 
largely from the region at the head of 
the great lakes. It is this fact that 
gives (.'hicago the chance to acquire 
the supremacy as an iron and steel pro- 
ducing center. Iron ore can be 
brought to the foot of Lake Michigan 
cheaper than it can be taken to Pitts- 
burg, since the latter trip requires a 
rail haul for part of the distance. 

The three principal ingredients 
which go to the making of iron and 
steel are the natural ore, the fuel and 



OF INTEREST TO ENGINEERS 



77 



limestone. Limestone abounds near 
Chicago. The iron ore can be brought 
here at relatively small cost. Chicago 
is near great coal fields. In so far as 
the coal of Pennsylvania, with its bet- 
ter coking qualities, is required in 
some of the steel-making processes, 
there is more economy in bringing it 
or the coke made from it to this point 
than in taking the ore to Pittsburg. If 
the coal is coked near Chicago the gas 
formed as a by-product can be readily 
marketed. Because of these consider- 
ations the greatest iron and steel mak- 
ing plant of the United States Steel 
corporation is being established at 
Gary, which is a suburb of Chicago. 

The presence of cheap iron and steel 
is an invitation to manufacturing 
plants which need them as raw mat- 
rial to come to this neighborhood. It 
is not surprising, therefore, that great 
manufacturers are seeking sites in the 
environs of Chicago. These elements 
of growth in population and business 
must exercise an immense influence 
upon this great community in the com- 
ing years. 



GARY MILLS SEEN BY ENGINEERS 

Exhaustive Article on the Engineering 
Features of the Great Plant. 

4,000 TONS OP RAILS DAILY 

Capacity Will be 4,000,000 Tons Per 
Year — All Operated by Elec- 
tricity. 

The Engineering Record, one of the 
great engineering periodicals in the 
country, devoted several pages of its 
issue last week to the steel mills at 
Gary. The article is exceedingly im- 
portant, as showing the view point of 



leading engineers. Extracts are given 
below : 

Practically the whole plant will be 
operated by poAver furnished by inter- 
nal-combustion engines, using blast 
furnace gas. The plans call for sixteen 
500-ton blast furnaces of standard de- 
sign, eight of which are now either 
completed or under construction. 

Cleansing' the Gas. 

The gas passes from the top of each 
furnace through four outlets into two 
downcomer pipes, which lead into a 
dry dust catcher, thirty feet in diam- 
eter by forty feet high. In the latter 
a considerable part of the impurities 
settles to the bottom and the gas pass- 
es into another large pipe which leads 
upward some distance to increase the 
quantity of dust dropped and then 
turns down again emptying into a sup- 
plementary tank, fourteen feet in di- 
ameter by twenty-five feet high, 
one of which serves each pair of 
furnaces. This structure not only pro- 
vides an additional dust catcher, but 
also acts as a valve, being divided into 
two compartments partially filled with 
water. The two chambers of this tank 
discharge into a pipe ten feet in diam- 
eter, which cai'ries the gas into the pri- 
mary wet washers. 

The primary washers are cylindrical, 
with a cone-shaped bottom and top, 
and are kept about one-third full of 
water. Water cascades down through 
each drum, and the stream of gas is 
directed up against if from near the 
bottom of the drums. A stream of 
water is spread into a film on the sur- 
face of the cylinder, and the whirling 
drum throws such impurities as the 
gas still holds out against the water 
film, where they are caught. From 
these final washers the gas is conveyed 
under slight pressure to the holders, 
each of wliich has 200,000 cubic feet 
capacity, from which it goes, as re- 



78 



IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909' 



quired, to the electric power station 
and blowing engine houses. 

44,900,000 Cubic Feet Per Day. 

Sixteen blast furnaces produce about 
44,900,000 cubic feet of gas per twenty- 
four hours, equivalent when used in gas 

engines, to 500,000 horse power. 

Of this quantity approximately 30 per 
cent, is taken for heating the stoves, 
7.6 per cent, is diverted to steam boil- 
er furnaces, 5 per cent, is consumed by 
various auxiliaries or lost in the pro- 
cess of cleansing, 12.5 per cent, oper- 
ates the gas engine-driven blowers, and 
45 i^er cent, supplies the electrical pow- 
er station. 

For the eight furnaces thus far erec- 
ted there are two blowing engine 
houses, one of which is 600 feet long 
and 104 feet wide, and the other of 
the same width, but 530 feet long. The 
former building includes a central 
pumping and hydraulic power plant. 
Each house contains two steam-driven 
blowers, in addition to the gas engines, 
but when the plant is in fiill operation 
these blowers will not be used. 

Each of the sixteen blowing engines 
consists of a horizontal, twin-tandem 
2,500 horse-power gas engine, having 
42x54 inch cylinders, and two direct- 
driven Slick blowing tubes rated at 30,- 
000 cubic feet of free air per minute 
against a pressure of eighteen pounds 
per square inch, but proportioned for 
operation at any pressure up to thirty 
pounds. 

Electric Power Station. 

The central power station, which is 
105x966 feet in plan, with forty-two 
transverse twenty-three feet bays, ad- 
joins the blowing engine houses and 
is between the blast and open-hearth 
furnaces. 

This places it advantageously for fuel 
supply and insures minimum lengths 



of transmission lines to the various 
departments furnished with current. 
The foundations of this building and 
also of both blower houses consist in 
each case of a slab of concrete five feet 
thick, underlying the entire structure at 
about the level of Lake Michigan. On 
this heavy slab are separate founda- 
tions for each of the generating and 
blowing units. 

In order to pass from the blast to the 
open hearth furnaces a subway has 
been built under the floor of the build- 
ing at the transverse center line of the 
latter, thus enabling workmen to avoid 
a long detour that, would otherwise be 
required to keep them out of the power 
house. 

In this central station are installed 
seventeen 4,000 horse-power horizontal, 
twin-tandem, double-acting gas en- 
gines, fifteen of which are designed for 
coupling to alternating-current gener- 
ators and two to be connected to di- 
rect-current generators. 

Exhaust From Gas Engine. 

The exhaust from the gas engines is 
conveyed to a 9x12 feet under-ground 
tunnel, immediately outside the build- 
ing. This tunnel runs the length of 
the building and is provided at each 
end with a stack, nine feet in diameter 
by ninety-two feet high. The same 
method of muffling the exhaust is pro- 
vided for the blowing engine houses. 

The power generated will be distrib- 
uted throughout the works and used 
to operate heavy induction-motor-driv- 
en rolls, the tilting and feed tables for 
the various passes, the hot saws, hot 
and cold pull-ups, hot rolls, transfer 
tables, straightening and drilling ma- 
chines, cold saws, elevators, conveyors, 
pumps and a multitude of machines 
and mechanical devices auxiliary to 
the operation of such an enormous 
plant. Several of the motors for driv- 
ing rolls in these works are of 6,000 



OF INTEREST TO ENGINEERS 



79 



horsepower capacity each. Prom these 
large motors the size ranges down to 
machines of the smallest capacity used 
to operate sAvitches in the power house. 
The problems of control presented by 
the multitude of motors installed in the 
plant involve many unusual features. 
The electrical system as a whole is sub- 
ject to central control at a switchboard 
operated from a gallery, sixteen feet 
high, in the station. 

Open Hearth Furnaces. 

In the construction of the open 
hearth furnaces provision has been 
made for retaining the heat of the 
molten iron. At the same time a more 
uniform quality of the ingots is in- 
sured by conveying the molten iron di- 
rectly from the plast furnaces to enor- 
mous mixer in 40-ton ladles on special 
trucks. These mixers, of which there 
are two, with a capacity of 300 tons 
each, are shaped like converters and 
are in the north end of each of the 
open-hearth furnace buildings. Prom 
these the molten metal is again poured 
into 40-ton ladles, carried by cranes to 
the furnaces and there emptied in by 
means of charging machines. 

The plans of the plant provide for 
six batteries of basic oijen-hearth fur- 
naces, fourteen to the building, of 
which tAvo batteries, or twenty-eight 
furnaces, are at present constructed. 
The six open-hearth furnace buildings 
contemplated in the plans will be iden- 
tical with the others in construction, 
being 1,200 feet long and built in 
three spans, giving a total width of 193 
feet, with a height of 104 feet above 
the floor line, thus allowing for ex- 
cellent ventilation. 

At the north end of each open-hearth 
building is a structure eighty-six feet 
wide by 120 feet long, for the mixers, 
and for a pit for relining the 40-ton hot- 
metal ladles. The balance is occupied 
by the furnaces, each sixteen feet 



wide and forty feet long, with 
a rated capacity of seventy tons. 
In the construction of each fur- 
nace 800,000 bricks were required, 
making a total for one building of over 
11,000,000, or about 67,000,000 bricks 
in the six buildings to be built. The 
open-hearth buildings are equipped 
with electrically-operated cranes, both 
traveling and fixed, one with a capa- 
city of ]25 tons being provided in the 
casting department, and another of 
the same capacity on the charging side 
of the furnaces. The ladles employed in 
pouring off are each of eighty tons capa- 
city. 

12,000 Tons Daily Capacity. 

As it takes about eight hours for a 
heat in one of the open-hearth fur- 
naces, and the latter are never allowed 
to cool except for repairs, the daily 
capacity of each of them will be ap- 
proximately 210 tons, giving, with one 
furnace down for repairs, a daily total 
of 3,360 tons for each building. When 
the four open-hearth buildings now 
completed or under construction are 
in operation, the Gary plant will, there- 
fore, have a capacity of 12,000 tons of 
steel per day or 2,500,000 tons per 
year. With all six buildings in ser- 
vice the total capacity of the plant, as 
planned by the United States Steel 
Corporation, will be upwards of 4,000,- 
000 tons per year. 

With everything running at full ca- 
pacity, 4,000 tons of steel rails can be 
produced daily, and in a normal oper- 
ation the mill is expected to turn out 
100,000 tons per month. 

The group of rail mill buildings is 
about 300 yards from the lines of the 
open-hearth furnaces. The main struc- 
ture is 1,800 feet long, and at right 
angles to it is another building of one- 
third the length, with a width of eighty- 
five feet in a single span. This latter 
building contains twelve soaking pits, 



80 



"IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909' 



each supplied with gas from an inde- 
pendent mechanical gas producer. The 
arrangement here is such that ingots 
enter from the open-hearth furnace 
buildings along the entire length of 
one side of the pit building, the other 
side being reserved for the electrically 
operated ingot buggies which transfer 
the heated ingots through the first 
stand rolls. The ingots used are 20x24 
inches by six. feet, weighing 8,500 
pounds each. 

Progress of the Rail. 

After the finishing pass the rail trav- 
els through to the saws, of which five 
are provided, thus cutting four rails to 
length. These four rail lengths consist 
of half the ingot. As the capacity of 
this mill is 4,000 gross tons per 
twenty-four hours, it will be seen 
that there must be a four-rail 
length sawed about every half min- 
ute. The saAvs are forty-two-inch 
blades, arranged to be raised and low- 
ered in unison by one controller from 
the hot-saw ojaerator. Following ■ the 
hot-saw run the rails pass over the usu- 
al cambering machine and are run on- 
to hot beds, 100 feet long, of which 
four are at present installed, with pro- 
vision made for two more if necessary. 
These hot beds extend to the south of 
the mill proper. In the finishing mill 
section they are of unusual design, be- 
ing made of structural material and 
placed eight feet above the floor to al- 
low for an extraordinary large air 
space to facilitate the rapid cooling of 
the rails. 

The finishing building is 1,383 feet 
long, central with the hot beds, and is 
provided with live rolls extending its 
entire length. Presses complete the 
rails, and from them the rails are 
transferred to a roller table, which ex- 
tends the full length of the building, 
and from which the rolls may be skid- 
ded to the loading beds just outside 
the building. 



Operated by Electricity. 

For the operation of cranes, tables 
and other apparatus, in and about the 
rail mill, requiring direct current, two 
500 kilowatt synchronous motors driv- 
ing direct-current generators have 
been furnished. This ecjuipment, with 
the necessary switchboards, is located 
in one of the motor houses at the rail 
mill and is designated Sub-station No. 
1. Other sub-stations suitably ec|uipped 
are being located in other sections of 
the plant. 

The loading yard is provided with 
the usual inspection beds and two 
tracks, each about 1,400 feet long, con- 
nected with the track system of the 
plant at both ends, thus avoiding any 
unnecessary shifting. The yard is al- 
so served by an eighty-foot traveling 
crane for the entire length of the finish- 
ing department, and by means of this 
the rails are placed directly on flat cars. 
In loading steel rails the ordinary way 
has been to switch in on stub tracks, 
which requires the cars to go out the 
same way. In the Gary plant the rail- 
road tracks along the finishing depart- 
ment of the rail mills will be at a 
slight grade, so that the cars can be 
moved by gravity to the point where 
they are needed. The empty cars 
come in on one of the nine tracks form- 
ing the trunk line. They are then 
switched to tracks making a broad 
curve to the finishing department. 

Billet Mill. 

Tlie billet mill consists of four con- 
tinuous stands of forty-inch blooming 
mills, each two of which are driven by 
a 2,000 horse-power motor. After leav- 
ing these the ingot is turned end for 
end on a turntable and passes through 
a five-stand, thirty-tAvo-inch continuous 
mill, the entire mechanism of Avliich is 
driven by one 6.000 horse-poAver motor. 
At the end of the tAventy-four inch mill 
is placed a roller table. The billets 
may be transferred to an eighteen-inch 



OF INTEREST TO ENGINEERS 



81 



coiitiniTOUs mill to be further reduced, 
or, if for sale, to a shear and from 
theuce to overhead billet pockets, from 
which they may be loaded directly 
into cars. 

The ingots for the billet mill are 
heated in twelve soaking pit furnaces, 
arranged similarly to those adjoining 
the rail mill. Each of the pits in both 
buildings is supplied with gas from 
one independent mechanical gas pro- 
ducer. 

The additional mills to be built are 
a 60-inch universal plate mill, which 
will be the largest of its kind in the 
world, and a 44x1 60-inch sheared plate 
mill. These two mills Avill each be 
served by a 32-inch slabbing metal. 
Further extensions to the Gary works 
include an axle mill, a structural mill, 
an 8-inch, a lO-mcli, a 14-inch and an 
18-inch merchant bill. The mill build- 
ings have steel frames with brick sides 
and corrugated iron roofs. The open 
hearth stripper and soaking pit build- 
ings have steel frames and corrugated 
iron sides and roofs. The struc- 
tural steel in these buildings and 
elsewhere in the plant was fur- 
nished by the American Bridge Com- 
pany, supplemented by the Illinois 
Steel Company. 

The blast furnace plant is also pro- 
vided with live pig casting machines. 
These machines make pig iron and 
load it directly on cars, if for any rea- 
son the open-hearth plants are unable 
to take care of the product of the blast 
furnaces, as on Sunday, when the mills 
are not in operation, or when it is de- 
sired to send the pig to any other plant 
of the United States Steel Corporation. 

In connection with the furnaces and 
mills of the steel plant proper, there 
has been erected a group of buildings 
of general utility, consisting of a ma- 
chine shop, foundry, boiler shop, black- 
smith shop, pattern and carpenter shop, 
pattern storage building, roll shop, 
electrical repair shop, brick storage 



house and a well equipped general 
storehouse. These shops have steel 
frames, brick walls and concrete tile 
roofs. There has also been provided a 
yard locomotive house, which is rec- 
tangular in plan, with tracks running 
through on an angle from one side to 
the other, thus avoiding the necessity 
of a turn-table. 

Of these utility building's the most 
interesting is probably the foundry, a 
structure 136x400 feet in plan, in three 
spans of 36, 40 and 60 feet respectively. 
This building contains two cupolas for 
making iron castings, and two 25-ton 
oi^en-hearth furnaces for making steel 
castings. It is served by eight cranes 
of capacities ranging from 5 to 50 tons. 
The blacksmith shop is also notewor- 
thy for the improved appliances which 
it contains, and it likewise houses 
boilers to generate steam for operating 
trip hammers and for heating the 
shops of this group. 



ENGINEER OFFICE, U. S. ARMY, 
508 Federal Building. 

Chicago, July 27, 1908. 
Mr. H. S. Norton, 

President Gary Commercial Club, 
Gary, Ind. 
Dear Sir: 

I desire to thank you specially for 
your invitation of last week to the 
"Oldening of Gary Harbor," and for 
the pleasure which it gave me to ac- 
cei^t and be present. 

The possibilities of Gary are enor- 
mous; it starts to-day with the advan- 
tages which Chicago acquired only 
after many years of hard struggles. If 
properly handled, Gary and its adjoin- 
ing towns may in fifteen to twenty 
years rival, if not surpass, Chicago as 
a commercial and manufacturing com- 
munity. May it successfully arrive at 
that position. 

Very truly, 

W. H. BIXBY, 
Colonel Engineers, U. S. Army. 



82 



IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909" 



THE MAP HEREWITH 

had, during last year, months of care- 
ful preparation by the writer, and, 
since then, has been changed to date. 
Steel Company officials and railway of- 
ticials have strongly commended it. 
The lines of railroad shown are from 
surveys furnished by the Engineering 
Department of the Vanderbilt System. 
The following points can be better un- 
derstood by reference to the map : 

Each mile square is what is called 
a "section" and the number of the 
section is in the middle of it. 

The Steel Company's subdivision, 
shown in white, contains the lots that 
they are selling with building restric- 
tions, etc., and is all the property they 
have on the market. This subdivision 
is the "core" of the city and contains 
some fifty miles of streets that are 
paved or being paved. 

The east and west street ear line in 
this subdivision is on Fifth avenue, and 
the north and south one on Broadway. 
These are the business streets of the 
town on which buyers of lots must 
biiild brick and stone store buildings. 
On other streets, residence improve- 
ments are required. 

The town is spreading out far and 
wide beyond this subdivision into ter- 
ritory where no building restrictions 
are imposed, but there are strong as- 
surances of the city's realizing on the 
Steel Company's theory that a new 
city with a heart or core, one mile by 
two miles in area, of fine streets and . 
good buildings, will stimulate the same 
things in all additions thereto. 

All east and west streets are "ave- 
nues" aud numbered from First ave- 
nue, crossing the north end of Broad- 
way at the entrance to the works, to 
Ninth avenue at the south edge of 
their subdivision, and about Twentieth 
avenue at the Port "Wayne crossing 
and depot on Broadway. 

The thoroughfares running north 



and south are called "streets"; those 
lying east of Broadway being named 
after the states of the Union, and those 
lying west of Broadway named after 
the presidents in the order of their 
election. 

At the north end of Broadway is 
about to be built the large Union De- 
pot of the Lake Shore and the Balti- 
more & Ohio Railroads ; at about Ninth 
avenue and Broadway will be the 
Union Depot of the Michigan Central 
and Gary and Western; and about 
Twentieth avenue and Broadway the 
depot of the Fort Wayne Railroad. 

At the upper end of Broadway is 
the entrance to the mills and the de- 
pot of the Chicago, Lake Shore & 
South Bend Electric, a through fast 
line running hourly trains between 
Gary and Chicago and from which, 
just west of the Steel Company's sub- 
division, a branch is in operation into 
the ToUeston region. The Broadway 
line also has a branch westward on 
Eleventh avenue to Tolleston. 

Where the stations on the new Gary 
& Western R. R. would be, has been 
a matter of much curiosity and some 
significance. Their location has just 
been announced. Near the American 
Locomotive Works there will be a new 
station called Alco. The other stations 
are at Broadway ; 1st St. in Tolleston ; 
one at Clark Road; one at Ivanhoe, 
and one at Gibson. The one at Clark 
Road is a Union Depot for the Gary & 
Western and the Michigan Central. 

The shaded portion of the map rep- 
resents the about 10,000 acres of the 
Steel Company's industrial lands. 
None of this is for sale unless it be to 
manufacturing institutions desired by 
the Steel Company. 

Through these lands extends east 
and west, the Grand Calumet River, 
which is to be straightened, widened 
and deepened to form the Lake Michi- 
gan end of the Ship Canal to the Gulf. 




L 



M 



H- 



^z 



-* \c 



T 



-U 




^L\ 



THE MAP OF GARY AND VICINITY 



83 



Along the south edge of the map is 
shown the Little Calumet, along each 
side of which is considerable low land, 
between which and the Steel Com- 
pany's holdings are about all of the 
Gary acres that are "ripe" for subdi- 
vision. Much of this is already in lots 
and the reader will see that the best, 
close in, acreage that is for sale, is lim- 
ited in quantity. Even some of this 
acreage is low in spots, which is one 
of the things a man well posted in real 
estate there must know about. It is 
generally made of ridges several hun- 
dred feet wide, extending east and 
west with depressions of about the 
same width between the ridges. It is 
usually covered with small trees from 
ten to thirty feet high, and nearly all 
of sand surface to such an extent that 
it is bare of grass. If the trees were 
cut away it would look like an im- 
mense stone wash board. 

There are as yet in this outlying dis- 
trict, not many wagon roads and very 
few of them even graveled. The only 
way to know this land thoroughly is 
to "tramp" around and over it, which 



the writer did in the summer of 1907 
to the extent of hundreds of miles and 
as much more since. 

WHAT DOES "TOLLESTON" 
MEAN? 

It means an attractive residence 
area cornering into the corporate town 
of Gary and now, in every way but 
legally, a part of Gary. All students 
of the situation consider it certain 
that within a year or two, the corpo- 
rate town of Tolleston will be merged 
into Gary. In the northeast corner of 
the town of Tolleston is a small village 
at the crossing of the Michigan Cen- 
tral and Fort Wayne Railroads, called 
Tolleston. It is peopled by good Ger- 
man citizens who have lived there for 
a generation and has very good resi- 
dence conditions, including schools, 
drainage, transportation, high ground, 
much line tree growth and has now 
two electric lines to the entrance to 
the Steel Works, only six or eight min- 
utes away. 



84 



IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909' 



For those who are Wondering how it w^ould be 
to Live in Gary ? 

To such readers, certainly no more accurate idea could be con- 
veyed in print than the following few pages of clippings, mostly from 
the Gary Tribune, covering a period of the last year and a half. 
While one of such clippings of itself might not signify much, the 
aggregate, novel as the method is, will throw much light on the civic, 
social and educational affairs of the town, which interest every reading 
member of a family that is thinking of moving to Gary. Many of the 
clippings are condensed and many residents' names omitted. 

OMAHA COUNCILMEN IN GARY. 
LID NAILED DOWN ON 

GARY SALOONS 



Magic City of Steel Takes Its Place on 
Water Wagon for a Year. 

The City of Gary was turned out of 
the sanitarium where it has been under 
treatment for the past year, and those 
who had the city in their care say that 
it is effectually cured of the liquor 
habit. 

But those who knew Gary in the 
palmy days when the "lid was off," 
are standing around the corner, and 
patientlj' waiting to see a headlong 
tumble from the water wagon. To- 
day the city sits proudly on the seat 
beside the driver of that time honored 
vehicle Avhich is filled with many sister 
cities of Indiana. 

Lid Reverently Nailed Down. 

There were only fovirteen saloons 
left to pass away, and it was midnight 
before the doors were closed. Patrons 
of the various saloons gathered around 
the bars, and bought the small stock 
that remained in the shelves. 

Then at 12 o'clock, one hour later 
than the usual closing time, the pro- 
prietors shook hands with the patrons 
and the "lid" Avas closed, reverently 
nailed own and securely sealed. 



I^' embers of Junketing Party Look 
Over Local Pavements. 
Gary is fast gaining an enviable 
reputation among the city councils and 
county commissioners of the country 
for her pavements and civic improve- 
ments. Last Saturday the county 
commissioners of Omaha, Neb., made 
a trip to this city to inspect the streets 
and pavements. 



FOR FIRST PRESBYTERIAN. 

Ground Broken by Church Officials — 

First Spadeful Turned by 

Mrs. Walton. 

Ground was broken Tuesday after- 
noon for the building of the first Pres- 
byterian church in Gary. The building 
committee of the Presbyterian church, 
the trustees and Rev. and Mrs. F. E. 
Walton, pastor of the church, gathered 
at the site at Van Buren street and 
Sixth avenue Tuesday afternoon at 
2 :'S0 to turn the first earth for the new 
building, which will be erected at once. 



STILL ANOTHER TROLLEY LINE. 

Applications for a franchise for a 
new interurban railroad connecting 
the cities of Hammond, East Chicago, 
Indiana Harbor, Gary and Crown 
Point will be made to the councils of 
Hammond and East Chicago, Monday 
night by a company known as the 
Calumet Traction Company. 



HOW WOULD IT BE TO LiVE IN GARY? 



85 



BIG FLAT BUILDING ON 6TH AVE. 



Twelve-Apartment Structure Corner of 
Van Euren Street to Cost $40,000. 

Another big flat building will go up 
at Sixth avenue and Van Buren street. 
It will be three stories high and have 
accommodations for twelve families. 

The new building is on the southeast 
corner diagonally across from the 
Brant building, which is now being 
erected on the northwest corner, and 
which will also be three stories high 
and will contain twelve flats. 

Will Cost $40,000. 

The plans for the new building call 
for pressed brick front with Bedford 
stone trimmings, and are for one of the 
best structures of its kind in Gary. 
The estimate cost is $40,000. 



SOCIETY IN GARY. 



One of the pleasant receptions of the 
week occurred Wednesday afternoon 
at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Harry Al- 
schuler. Mrs. Alschuler was the 
hostess to a party of eighty ladies of 
Gary and Chicago, who took this op- 
portunity to visit the newly completed 
home of the Alschulers at 600 Van 
Buren street. 

The reception was held from 3 to 6 
o'clock and during its progress a three- 
course luncheon was served in the 
beautifid dining room of the resi- 
dence. 

The decorations were in red and 
green and tastily arranged. Holly and 
poinsetti were among the decorations 
and carried out admirably the Christ- 
mas effect desired. 

Mr. and Mrs. Alschuler have been 
in their new home only a fcAv weeks 
and the reception was the first of a 
number of social functions they will 



give during the season. The house is 
beautifully decorated and arranged. 

In receiving Mrs. Alschuler was as- 
sisted by Miss Stearn of Chicago and 
Mrs. E. G. Cogshell of this city. 

Mrs. W. P. Gleason entertained yes- 
terday from 12 to 2 p. m., at a nine- 
course luncheon, in honor of Mrs. Ray- 
mond Lennon of Joliet. The Gleason 
home at Seventh avenue and Jackson 
street was beautifully decorated in 
colors and roses and palms. The din- 
ing table was decorated with pink 
roses. The reception room was adorned 
with American beauty roses and the 
living room was decorated in red and 
green, with palms. 

Besides Mrs. Raymond Lennon, in 
whose honor the luncheon was given, 
were Mrs. Daniel Lennon, Mrs. J. Len- 
non and Miss Nellie Lennon of Joliet. 

The Cotillion Club of Gary, the new- 
est organization of dancers, held its 
first annual dance last night at Bin- 
zenhof Hall. More than seventy-five 
couple were present. The hall was 
artistically decorated with crepe pa- 
per in gold and purple, the colors of 
the club. 

Music was furnished by Bigelow's 
Orchestra, and the dancing began at 9 
and continued until 12, there being 
about twenty numbers on the program. 
During the evening D. H. Pitzele, form- 
erly of Pittsburg, introduced a number 
of fancy dances from the east, which 
will be included in the programs of 
future functions given by the club. 



MASONIC TEMPLE IS 

NOW PLANNED 



Social Club of the Order Decides to 
Build. 

Arrangements for the purchase of 
property upon which to build a Ma- 
sonic Temple were completed Wednes- 
day night at a meeting of the members 



86 



IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909" 



of the Gp.ry Masonic Social Club at the 
Delaware Hotel. It is the intention 
of the Masonic order in Gary to pro- 
ceed as speedily as possible with the 
plans already mapped out and it is be- 
lieved that within a few months 
groimd will be broken upon which the 
temple will be erected. 



BIG BUSINESS OF GARY'S P. 0. 



Over $250,000 Handled in 1908, Ac- 
cording to Postmaster Call's 
Official Figures. 



SOME STARTLING STATISTICS. 

The Gary pcstoffice did a business of 
a quarter of a million dollars in 1908. 

Postmaster Call has just compiled 
the statistics of his office for last year. 
The figures are fairly startling as to 
the volume of business transacted in 
the office. 

The total receipts of the office for 
the year were $15,540. 

The total number of pieces of mail 
handled at the Gary office during the 
year was about 2,500,000. 



NIGHT SCHOOLS TO 

TEACH ENGLISH 

Great Boon of Foreign-Born Residents 
Soon to Be Installed in Gary. 

The school board of Gary has com- 
pleted all arrangements whereby the 
night school system will be opened 
within a few days after New Year's. 
A large attendance is expected. 

More than thirty applications have 
been made by young men who wish to 
enter the schools as soon as they are 
opened. The applicants have been 
mostly foreigners who wish to become 



better acquainted with the English 
language. 

The first courses taken up in the 
night scJiool will be the learning of 
English and other studies which bring 
into use the study and constant use of 
the English language. The teachers 
employed will speak the English lan- 
guage alone, this system being now 
considered the best for teaching lan- 
guages. After the English language is 
thoroughly understood by the students 
other branches of study will be taken 
up, and taught to the students, who 
may want a more advanced education 
in English branches. 

Manual training will be given a 
prominent place in the night schools 
when the system is thoroughly estab- 
lished. The electrician, clerk, carpen- 
ter, or men of any other trade may at- 
tend the schools and secure instruction 
in the advanced courses of his work 
entirely free of charge. 
Modeled After German Night Schools. 

The famous system of training 
schools of Germany, in which young 
men are trained after leaving the com- 
mon schools, will be models after 
which the Gary night school system 
will be fashioned. The aim of the 
board is to give aid to every person 
who wishes to specialize in any one 
line. 



CITY HALL PLANS. 



STRUCTURE TO COST $45,000. 



To Be Located at Seventh and Mas- 
sachusetts. 

tl. E. Hammons & Sou were awarded 
the contract for the architectural work 
on the new Gary City ITall by the 
board of trustees Tuesday afternoon. 
The decision was reached by the trus- 
tees after plans had been submitted 
by three architects. 



HOWiWOULD IT BE TO LIVE IN GARY? 



87 



Fire Department on First Floor. 

The fire department will be located 
on the first floor, too. Space has been 
provided in the center of the bnilding 
for fire buggies and an engine. Pour 
stalls are provided and a fireman's 
room, giving 400 square feet of space, 
is furnished. The chief of the fire de- 
partment will have a private office 10 
by 14 feet. The fire buggy and patrol 
wagon will be taken care of on another 
side of the building. Three horse 
stalls are provided there. 



CONFIDENCE IN GARY. 



How Gary is regarded at Indianapo- 
lis was shown Tuesday in the bids for 
the bonds, which the Town of Gary is 
selling to build the City Hall. 

The two highest bidders were bond 
houses from the state capital. Indi- 
anapolis houses saw the Chicago bond 
houses and not only went them one 
better, but went them several better in 
their ofliers. In fact, the prices offered 
by Indianapolis houses show that 
Gary's credit is as good as the credit 
of metropolitan cities. Even at 4 per 
cent, a good premium was offered for 
the bonds. 



FEAST ON ROAST PIG. 



University Men Hold Weekly Dinner 
— Dr. Hosmer Carves. 

Members of the Univei'sity Club 
feasted on roast pig and chicken Fri- 
day evening at the Gary Hotel at the 
weekly dinner. Manager O'Donnell, 
of the hotel, prepared the north din- 
ing room of the hotel for his guests 
and placed a piano in the room so that 
all sorts of college songs could be in- 
dulged in. 



All the men were seated at a single 
table placed in the center of the room. 
The honor of carving the pig fell to 
Dr. H. M. Hosmer. 



CALL IS NOW FOR ACRES TO 
DIVIDE. 



Gary real estate is closing the year 
in a sort of statu cjuo. The most 
marked feature of the closing weeks 
is a sharp demand for acreage which 
the purchasers desire to hold until 
next sunnner before subdividing them. 
Several important sales have been 
closed in and around Tolleston of this 
kind. 



STORES CLOSE AT 9 TO-NIGHT. 

According to the agreement signed 
by forty-three of the Gary merchants, 
practically all of the business houses 
in Gary Monday night closing at 9 
o'clock every evening with the excep- 
tion of Saturdays and pay days. The 
stores remain closed all day Sundays. 



PERSONAL MENTION. 



Will H. Moore, a veteran real estate 
man of high standing in Chicago, 
writes a letter to the Gary Tribune, 
which is well worth the reading by 
every man dealing in Gary property. 



Mr. and Mrs. J. W. Williams of 
Marshall, Minn., parents of Mrs. Clar- 
ence C. Hall, are the guests of Mr. 
and Mrs. Hall at the Gary Hotel. They 
are en route to Hot Springs, Mo., and 
will continue on their way to the 
southern resort to-morrow. 



88 



"IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909' 



j\Irs. William McNeil has returned 
from a three clays' visit to New York 
City. 



Attorney R. C. Morrison spent Sun- 
day at his former home in Elkhart, 
Ind. 



REPAIR SHOPS MAKE A 

GIANT PLANT 



SECOND CONCERT IN COURSE. 



Masonic Social Club Prepares for 

Scotch Singers Friday Evening — 

Second Annual Ball. 

The Masonic Social Club last night, 
at its meeting at the Gary Hotel, pre- 
pared for the second entertainment in 
its lecture course next Friday night. It 
will be a concert by the Scotch singers. 
It was decided to make no further can- 
vass in the sale of season tickets, but 
to depend on the sale of course tickets 
at the banks and drug stores. The 
price of course tickets for the three 
remaining entertainments was fixed at 
$1.25. Besides the Scotch Singers Fri- 
day night, there will be a lecture by 
Opie Read in February and a concert 
by the Lyceum Grand Concert com- 
pany in March. 



BEGIN TO BUILD CASINO. 



The Gary Casino at Connecticut 
street and Fifth avenue was begun 
this week and it is the intention of the 
owners to get it in operation before 
September 1. The building will be 
used as a skating rink and dance hall. 
It will also be useful for public meet- 
ings. 



A Side Issue of the Big Mills Which in 

Itself Is a Great Industry with 

an Army of Workmen. 



BROADWAY LINED HALF A MILE. 

Aggregate of ground covered by 
buildings, 5 1-5 acres. 

Material used, steel, brick and ce- 
ment; wood only in doors and win- 
dows. 

Longest crane track, 660 feet. 

Total number of men to be employed 
when in full operation, 2,000. 

Storage cajjacity of fire brick, 2,000,- 
000. 

Product, repair work for the steel 
mills. 



The big buildings which line Broad- 
way for a half-juile between the via- 
duct and the rail mill, marking the 
northern terminus of Broadway, will 
themselves turn out no finished product 
to the world and yet they are most 
important in the operation of the 
plant. They are what is known as the 
"shops." They are simply to repair 
what wears out or breaks down in the 
great structures where the actual pro- 
duction of iron and steel is going for- 
Avard. 

Over Five Acres of Buildings. 

The "shops" in themselves make a 
large manufacturing establishment. In 
all, thej'' cover a space of five and a 
fifth acres. In construction they are 
absolutely fireproof. Steel, brick and 
cement are used. The only wood in 
any of the structures are window and 
door frames and doors. Unless there 
should be an earthquake or some simi- 
lar upheaval the shops are practically 



HOW WOULD IT BE TO LIVE IN GARY? 



indestructable. They will last as long 
as man continues to inhabit these 
parts. 

The "shops" can easily make new 
machinery and later on may be used in 
that way for constructive purposes. At 
present, however, all of the machinery 
used in the erection of the mills is com- 
ing from the factories, although the 
shops are so nearly completed that they 
could begin new construction within a 
fortnight. 

Can Be Doubled in Size. 

It is said that when the mills are in 
operation to the limit of the plans 
originally planned by the steel cor- 
poration, nearly 2,000 men will be em- 
ployed in the "shops" alone. 

AVith the same foresight for the 
future which has dominated the great 
Gary project from its inception, all of 
the shops are so located that they can 
be doubled in capacity by simply build- 
ing on additions. 



HOTEL ARRIVALS. 



Dec. 4, 1908. 

Gary Hotel — C. Z. Martin, Dayton, 
0.; R. M. Little, South Bend, Ind.; 
H. M. Love, Milwaukee, Wis.; F. H. 
Biggett, Jr., Pittsburg, Pa.; Mrs. M'. 
F. Whiting, Miss Florence Whiting, 
Engiewood; C. M. Brownson, Grand 
Rapids, Mich. ; Miss Inez Goddard, 
Miss Agnes Carnduff, F. P. Hamburg, 
Henry Teller, George P. Jackson, Chi- 
cago ; D. C. Maiton, Dayton, 0. ; F. R. 
Thompson, Indiana Harbor; L. Hen- 
man, New York; P. A. Lawler, Chi- 
cago ; C. J. Branham, Michigan City ; 
D. Henry Brennan, Carbondale, Pa. ; 
D. L. Guipe, Indianapolis, Ind. ; F. B. 
Castle, Quincy, 111. ; J. D. Shipman, W. 
Kline, Toledo", 0. ; J. M. Moody, Phila- 
delphia, Pa. ; p. W. Baylor, Chicago ; 



L. Adelsdorf, A. B. Monitz, E. A. Tifft, 
Chicago; Marvin W^allach, Oshkosh, 
Wis.; C. F. Richie, Milwaukee, Wis.; 
A. H. Coosley, Boston, Mass.; D. W. 
Sanders, Covington, Ind. ; L. D. Black- 
man, Miss Augusta Wallis, George A. 
McGinnity, Chicago ; P. N. Gavit and 
family, AVhiting, Ind. ; William Kulen- 
kamp, Ann Arbor, Mich. 

Victoria Hotel — W. L. Thomas, 
Titusville, Pa. ; Mortimer Madden, 
Charles Kidd, Indiana Llarbor, Ind.; 
George Deller, Cincinnati, 0. ; P. D. 
Rospler. Chicago-. D. S. Mitchell, Wil- 
liam Parry and wife, Chicago ; H. L. 
Ward, Cincinnati, 0. ; W. H. Heaton, 
Boston, Mass. ; E. L. Coddington, La 
Porte, Ind. ; John Pabiny, Seeleyville, 
111. ; W. F. Shrum, Latrobe, 111. ; Peter 
Klein, South Bend; Albert Uhl, St. 
Louis ; J. Barnes, Chicago ; Peter Klein, 
South Bend, Ind. ; Lillien Black, J. P. 
Brill, W. P. Hord, Thomas Grant and 
wife, Chicago ; C. B. Millar, Boston, 
Mass. ; William Herbold, Peru, 111. ; J. 
P. Potshard, Marshall, 111.; W. F. 
Shrum, Latrobe, Pa. ; Miss Eva Ditz- 
ler, Markle, Ind.; W. E. Blakely, In- 
dianapolis, Ind. ; Peter Kline, South 
Bend, Ind. ; James Mitchell and wife, 
Chicago. 

Hotel Norton— iliss C. M. Wright, 
La Grange 111. ; Dennis R. McCarthy, 
Niagara Palls, N. Y. ; H. S. Dickson, 
Toledo, 0. ; Howard Hildebrand, La 
Porte, Ind. ; George A. and Mrs. Hen- 
derson, Miss Brantley, Chicago ; Riley 
Denton, Wyoming, 111. ; Mrs. J. D. 
Campbell, Miss Selena Campbell, Mrs. 
Ursula Rose, Philadelphia, Pa. ; Glyde 
Uvkon, Plymouth, Mass. ; J. Nussbaum, 
Chicago, 111.; W. P. Tice, wife and 
daughter, Crown Point ; J. A. Davis, 
John Moran, Elyria, 0.; R. J. Scott, 
Davenport, la. ; J. A. Davis, W. S. 
Roche, Crown Point, Ind. ; John Mo- 
ran, Elyria, 0. ; R. L. Scott, Davenport, 
la. ; Charles Gahagan, George Dillon, 
Joliet, 111. 



90 "IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909" 

GARY REACHES ERA OF FLATS. WIAJESTIC TO OPEN MARCH 1. 



Apartment Buildings Now Going- Up 

On Both Sides of the First 

Subdivision. 



New $35,000 Building to Be Erected 
at Sixth Avenue and Van 
Buren Street. 

Gary has now reached the flat build- 
ing era of her existence. On every 
hand flats and apartment houses are 
going up. On both the east and west 
sides of the First Subdivision excava- 
tions are being dug and frame super- 
structures are being erected for flat 
buildings. 

Building to Cost $35,000. 

A twelve-flat three-story apartment 
building of latest design and construc- 
tion has been planned for the heart of 
the West Side residence district. The 
building will cost $35,000. It will be 
located at the northwest corner of Van 
Bixren street and Sixth avenue and will 
be erected by J. R. Brant of Indiana 
Harbor. 

The new flat building will face on 
Van Buren street with a large grass 
plot in front. Six flats will front on 
Van Buren street and the other six will 
front on Sixth avenue. The building 
■wall measure 50 by 125, the lot being 
150 feet in length and 90 feet in width. 

All Apartments Steam Heated. 

The ai:)artments will be steam heated, 
with stationary wash tubs and clothes 
driers in the basement. There will be 
a light court between the two sets of 
apartments and a freight elevator cap- 
able of giving service to all the flats. 

The building will be of brick with 
store trimmings, and have an orna- 
mental front. Mr. Brant has already 
erected a business building in Gary in 
the Minnesota block. He is confldent 
that a high-class flat building will pay 
returns on the investment. 



Gary's First Vaudeville Playhouse 
Nearing Completion — Town Be- 
ing Billed for First Show. 

Joseph S. Kuechlei, the local man- 
ager of the new Majestic Theater, 
which is nearing completion, came to 
Gary to-day, and will remain here 
while the theater is being flnished. Mr. 
Kuechlei will inspect the interior ar- 
rangements of the theater, place the 
advertising for the opening week, and 
make all arrangements to start the new 
vaudeville house successfvilly. 



LOOKING OVER GARY FOR Y. M. 
C. A, 

International Secretary McDill Here in 
Interest of Local Branch. 

George D. McDill, international sec- 
retary of the Young Men's Christian 
Association, with headquarters in Chi- 
cago, arrived in Gary yesterday after- 
noon for a visit of several days. Mr. 
McDill's purpose in coming to Gary is 
to acquaint himself thoroughly with 
the conditions in this city in order to 
make a report to the executive board 
of the organization, which, it is under- 
stood, is planning the establishment of 
Y. M. C. A. quarters in Gary. 

E. E. Stacey, Indiana state secretary, 
is also expected to be in Gary before 
the week is over. He will confer with 
Mr. McDill on the plans to be pursued 
in establishing headquarters and or- 
ganizing a local branch. 

The advisability of establishing Y. 
M. C. A. headquarters in Gary has been 
prominent in the minds of a number of 
residents for more than a year. It is 
believed that if the organization is 
given a good start here that it will 
soon grow to large proportions. In 
case a move is made in that direction it 



HOW AVOULD IT BE TO LIVE IN GARY? 



91 



is likely that funds will be subscribed 
for the erection of a building suitable 
to the purposes of the organization. It 
is understood that a large number of 
young men in Gary are interested in 
the i^roject and they are ready to be 
enlisted in the work just as soon as it 
is deemed advisable. 



GARY MINSTREL CLUB FORMED. 



Minstrel Show Will Be Given Two 
Nights— May 27 and 28. 

The Gary Minstrel Club, with a mem- 
bership of nearly thirty, was organ- 
ized Tuesday evening at Binzenhof 
Ilall. It is the purpose of the club to 
give the minstrel show for which it 
has been preparing on the nights of 
May 27 and 28 in Binzenhof liall. A 
professional trainer from Chicago was 
present at the meeting and the initial 
instructions to the chorus and end men 
were given. 



ANNEXATION OF TOLLESTON. 

It is reported that a good many peo- 
ple residing in Tolleston are more than 
anxious for annexation to Gary, but 
the town board of Tolleston cannot see 
it in that light. On the other hand, 
the town board of Gary is ready to 
take in its western neighbor as soon 
as the people want to join. 

Tolleston is really a part of Gary 
and there is no logical reason why it 
should not have the same town govern- 
ment. Until Gary was founded Tolles- 
ton was without any significance and 
its growth within the past two years 
has been owing wholly to the founding 
of Gary. Its real estate has advanced 
simply because of the steel mills. In 
the end, Tolleston must become a part 
of Gary, and for the systematic de- 
velopment of the new city annexation 
cannot come too soon. 



BANK DEPOSITS HAVE BIG JUMP. 

Gary Institutions Grow from $200,000 
to Half a Million in a Year. 

The banks of Gary made a remark- 
able advance in the period from July 
15, the date of their midsummer re- 
port, to September 23, when the last 
call was made. The report of the 
First State Bank of Tolleston is not 
in hand to make a complete analysis 
of the three Gary banks, but the re- 
port of the First National and the 
Gary State Bank exhibits a remarka- 
ble advance. 

Great Gain in Figures. 

The total deposits of the two banks 
September 23 were : $411,655.37. This 
was a gain of $138,867.76. The loans 
of the two banks up to September 23 
were $193,346.46, a gain of $40,624.29. 

If the Tolleston Bank, which is 
really a part of Gary's financial inter- 
ests, were added, the total deposits 
would doubtless exceed half a million 
dollars. 

The steady increase in the item of 
loans and discounts show that the local 
banks are being able gradually to. in- 
crease their facilities to local business 
firms and contractors. 

Tremendous Gain in a Year. 

September 23, 1907, the deposits in 
the First National Bank of Gary were 
$123,463.18. The Gary State Bank 
had not yet begun business, but the 
First Bank of Tolleston had deposits 
bringing the deposits for Gary to about 
$200,000. The increase from $200,000 
to $500,000 in a year represents the 
progress of the city as a business and 
financial center. 

From the start one great difficulty 
of business men and contractors has 
been to secure needed accommodations 
in the way of loans. The new town 
did not have the banking capital re- 
quired and as yet the depositors were 



92 



IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909" 



not sufficiently numerous to add ma- 
tei-ially to the banking strength. 

Loans to Local Firms. 

During the past six months this con- 
dition has been rapidly changing for 
the better. Business houses are estab- 
lisliing a credit, and local bankers feel 
more certain in making loans. 

With the new building and loan as- 
sociation in operation, which will 
gather in local funds and render them 
available for loaning purposes, another 
step forward will be taken toward a 
larger working capital in the new city. 
The savings deposits in the Gary State 
Bank show a steady gain, and these, 
too, are adding to the banking 
strength. 

Merchants Making Money, 

The steady gain in bank deposits in- 
dicates that the merchants of Gary 
are making some money even if the 
lack of houses is seriously retarding 
the growth of the city by compelling 
families to live away from here. If 
homes should be provided in Gary for 
the families of all the men who are 
employed at the steel mills and in the 
construction of buildings, it would not 
be long before the bank deposits would 
.jump from half a million to a full mil- 
lion dollars. 



SOUTH SIDE NOW HAS GAS. 



TO BUILD SWEDISH CHURCH. 



Prospects for Place of Worship Are 
Considered Very Bright. 

Members of Swedish Lutheran 
church congregations in the northwest- 
ern part of the state met in Gary for 
the purpose of ascertaining the pros- 
pects of organizing a Swedish Luth- 
eran church in the steel town. The 
meeting was held in the Episcopal 
Church and the large attendance was 
very encouraging to the promoters of 
the proposed new church. 



First of Connections Turned On To-day 
Expected to Increase Rapidly. 

The south side now has gas, that 
much needed fuel and light for which 
residents of that part of Gary have 
been crying for months. A large num- 
ber of people have had connections 
made with their houses and places of 
business and the number is expected 
to increase as the mains are laid 
farther south. 



START WORK ON FORTY HOUSES. 



Will Occupy Entire Block South of the 
Pennsylvania. 

The contract for excavating the 
basements of the _ forty houses which 
are to be erected in the Wheeler and 
Petty Addition south of the Pennsyl- 
vania was let Monday. The work was 
begun Wednesday morning and will be 
completed Avithin thirty days. 

The sand taken from the basements 
will be used to fill in the low places in 
the block and the lots on which the 
houses are to be built will be leveled 
before the buildings are begun. 

The houses, to be built by a retired 
real estate dealer of Chicago, will oc- 
cupy the entire block. They will be 
cottages of various sizes and will be 
built so that they will be within the 
reach of the working men who wish 
to locate in that part of the town. 
They will be completed during the 
summer and will be placed on sale 
early in the fall. 



HOW WOULD IT BE TO LIVE IN GARY? 



93 



METHODISTS PLAN TO BUILD. 



Early Construction of Their Church at 

Seventh Avenue and Adams Street 

Is Now Assured. 

The iiienibers of the Methodist Epis- 
copal Church of Gary have taken the 
first steps toward building the new 
church at Seventh avenue and Adams 
street and the actual work of building 
will begin Avithin a iew days. 

The committee will hold a meeting 
this week to complete the arrange- 
ments for beginning the work. Plans 
that have been submitted by architects 
will probably be accepted. The church 
now has sufficient funds for beginning 
the work, and an attempt will be made 
to push the work to completion this 
spring. 



DOCTORS ARE TO AID COURT. 

Gary Medical Society to Appoint Dele- 
gates This Afternoon — Uni- 
versity Club Joins. 

The physicians of Gary will join in 
the general citzens committee for the 
establishment of a Superior Court in 
Gary. The physicians have taken 
great interest in the movement and as 
many of them have come to Gary from 
tOAvns and cities throughout the Hoo- 
sier state, their assistance will be most 
valuable in the legislature. 

The Gai-y Medical Society, in whose 
ranks are enlisted nearly all the phy- 
sicians of the new city, will hold a 
special meeting at the Gary Hotel this 
afternoon to select three delegates to 
the general citizens committee. 

Bar to Meet Friday Night. 

The Gary Bar Association will hold 
a special meeting at the Gary Hotel 
Friday evening to take up definite 
plans in the campaign for a court. 



The citizens general committee will 
meet at the same hotel Saturday even- 
ing, when matters of great importance 
will be considered. The presidents of 
all the constituent bodies have been in- 
vited to attend the meeting of the citi- 
zens committee, as their aid is needed 
on one or two vital issues. 

University Club to Join. 

The University Club will join in the 
citizens' general movement by naming 
three delegates to the committee. 
There are over seventy members of 
the University Club, and its addition 
to the citizens' movement Avill be de- 
cidedly helpful. 



TO WORK FOR MAIL CARRIERS. 



Commercial Club Names Committee, 

Which Will Get to Work for 

Mail Delivery in Gary. 

Prior to taking up the court ques- 
tion the Commercial Club appointed a 
committee to take charge of the move- 
ment for securing a mail delivery sys- 
tem in Gary. This committee will get 
itself in touch with the postoffice de- 
partment and take all necessary steps 
to force the issue of a carrier system 
in Gary. 



PRESBYTERIANS HOLD SOCIAL. 



One Hundred Persons Gather at Home 
of Rev. Walton for Evening. 

The u)usicale which was held by the 
members of the Presbyterian Church 
of this city, at the home of Rev. and 
Mrs. P. E. Walton, was one of the most 
pleasant social functions of the season. 
One hundred persons were present. 

Those who took part in the program 
were : Piano, Master Louis Christian- 



94 



'IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909" 



son, May McNeil, and Miss Vivian 
Creutz ; violin, William Douglass ; vo- 
cal, Ruby Gougli, Mr. Howard, Eugene 
K. De Witt; piano, Mr. Boyd; read- 
ings, Mrs. F. E. Walton, Dr. E. L. 
Schiable. 



greatest benefit to both the contractors 
and the building supply men. 



BIG FEAT IN CONSTRUCTION. 



AUis-Chalmers Company Has Already 
Delivered to Steel Mills 3,100 Cars. 

In the last annual report of the Allis- 
Chalmers Company, just made public 
in New York, some interesting figures 
regarding its contracts with the United 
States Steel corporation for material 
to be furnished and for orders already 
completed, are given. That part of 
the report relating to machinery fur- 
nished for the Gary plant reads as fol- 
lows : 

"On account of contracts with the 
United States Steel corporation's plant 
at Gary, Ind., the Allis-Chalmers Com- 
pany has already delivered 3,100 cars 
of machinery at that point. If those 
shipments had been moved at one time 
in one train the length would have 
been twenty-one and one-half miles." 



BUILDERS TO HAVE AN EX- 
CHANGE. 



The main topic of the Builders' and 
Contractors' Association meeting 
Thursday was the establishment of the 
Builders' and Traders' Exchange of 
Gary. The project of the establish- 
ment of such an exchange was brought 
up several weeks ago, but has never 
been definitely discussed until at the 
regular meeting Avhich was held in the 
Gai-y Hotel in the afternoon. 

The members of the association are 
practically unanimous in the opinion 
that the exchange would be of the 



THAT PASSENGER STATION. 



This announcement appears in to- 
day 's Construction News : ' ' The Lake 
Shore & Michigan Southern Railway 
Company, 144 Van Buren street, repre- 
sented by J. W. Crissey, its resiclent 
engineer, room 318, 144 Van Buren 
street, and the Baltimore & Ohio Rail- 
way Company, represented by L. G. 
Curtis, its division engineer, 135 
Adams street, will jointly build a pas- 
senger station at Gary, Ind. It will be 
two-story, 70x150 feet, of steel and 
concrete construction, have pressed 
brick exterior and is estimated to cost, 
including the train shed, about $200,- 
000." 



GARY A MIRACLE. 

"The greatest industrial miracle of 
the world is the City of Gary," began 
Senator Beveridge. "I have traveled 
12,000 miles during this campaign; I 
have seen the new cities of the coast 
and the cities that have sprung up in 
Oklahoma, but the fact remains that 
the most marvelous creation upon 
which the eyes of man ever looked is 
Gary, Ind." 



REPORT SHOWS 105 PERMITS. 



Majority of Those Issued Were for 
Residences in First Subdivision. 

Building Commissioner W. H. Kli- 
ver's report for the month of March 
shows that permits for 105 dwellings 
and business buildings were issued 
during that period. The majority of 
these were residences for the First sub- 
division and are now under construc- 
tion. 



HOW WOULD IT BE TO LIVE IN GARY? 



95 



WATER SOON TO 17TH AVENUE. 



WORKING ON FIRST 

ORDER FOR RAILS 



Mains Will Be Opened to 10th Avenue 
To-day— Rapid Work South. 

Water Superintendent Luscombe re- 
ports that the water is now running as 
far south as Eleventh avenue, and be- 
fore Thansl^giving will be running to 
Seventeenth avenue. 

Leonard Fitzgerald reports the open- 
ing of the gas mains Thursday as far 
south as Tenth avenue. 



SUBURBAN SERVICE ON 

THE WABASH 



More Trains to be Put on the Gary 
Run. 



NOW LEADS ALL OTHER LINES. 

E. I. Crossley, local passenger and 
freight agent of the Wabash Railroad, 
has taken up the question of suburban 
train service on that road and has re- 
ceived the promise that a complete sys- 
tem of suburban trains will be estab- 
lished here before April 1. 

Mr. Crossley came to Gary in No- 
vember, and found the affairs of the 
road in a bad condition. He recom- 
mended a 35-cent fare between Gary 
and Chicago, and it was accepted by 
the officials of the road, who decided 
that the former rate of 52 cents was 
more than should be charged to obtain 
the patronage of Gary people. 

More Suburban Trains. 

With the suburban fare established, 
four trains will be put on between 
Gary and Chicago. 

Great Freight Traffic. 

The W^abash, during the past three 
months, has exceeded all other roads in 
freight traffic at Gary, a greater 
amount of business being handled than 
by air other roads combined. 



Gary Plant Begins on Steel Rails for 
the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy. 

Steel rails are now being turned out 
by the Gary mills on their first order. 
They will go to the Chicago, Burling- 
ton & Quincy Railroad. The next 
order will be the first consignment on 
an order of 30,000 tons for the Balti- 
more & Ohio Railroad. 

Work began at 6 o'clock Tuesday, 
two crews being at work in the rail 
mill. They will work together this 
week, and next Monday they will be 
separated into day and night shifts, 
the rail mill then being kept in opera- 
tion without a stop for twenty-four 
hours of the day. 



NO OCCASION FOR SURPRISE. 



The announcement that the Ameri- 
can Locomotive Company will build 
the most complete and best equipped 
locomotive wox'ks in the world at Gary, 
Ind., should not be in the nature of a 
surprise to people who are familiar 
with the magnitude of affairs at that 
Avonderful place. The company has 
purchased 130 acres of land and is 
having plans drawn for a new plant. 
The land purchased is twice the extent 
of that occupied by the largest of the 
company's plants and when fully occu- 
pied the plant will give employment to 
from 12,000 to 15,000 men. The land ad- 
joins that of the new plant of the Unit- 
ed States Steel Corporation. The site 
at Gary, twenty-four miles from Chi- 
cago, was selected in order to provide 
for the territory where the largest 
number of railroads converge to a sin- 
gle commercial center. The Chicago 
district is a great railroad center and 
the district is favorable as a loca- 
tion for securing material for building 



96 



IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909" 



locomotives. The company now oper- EPISCOPAL CHURCH IS 



ates plants in Selmectady and Dun- 
kirk, N. Y., Pittsburg and Scranton, 
Pa., Richmond, Va., Paterson, N. J., 
Manchester, N. H., and Montreal, Can- 
ada. At present there is no large lo- 
comotive plant west of Pittsburg. The 
size of the new plant will be sufficient 
to provide liberally for the growing 
needs of the railroads for years to 
come. — Construction News. 



NOW ASSURED 



GARY DOCTORS TO ENTERTAIN 



Meeting of the Local Medical Society 

April 11 to be a Notable One — 

Many Will Attend. 

The meeting of the Gary Medical so- 
ciety on April 11 will be given over to 
the entertainment of representatives of 
medical societies from all of the cities 
in the northern part of Indiana and 
arrangements are being made for some 
of the best speakers in the medical pro- 
fession to be present at the meeting. 



TO BUILD TOLLESTON HOME 



A. Carlson to Construct Brick Resi- 
dence in Suburb. 

A. Carlson, the Gary real estate man 
Avill start within a day or two the erec- 
tion of a residence at the corner of 
Bormann boulevard and First street. 
The house will be of brick, two stories 
in height, containing six rooms and a 
bath. It will cost in the neighborhood 
of $3,000, and will be completed in two 
months. As soon as the house is ready 
for occupancy, Mr. Carlson will re- 
move his family from South Chicago. 



New York Donates $10,000 for the 
Building Fund. 

Five Thousand Dollars More Now Be- 
ing Raised in the Diocese for the 
Gary Edifice. 



SOME $35,000 TO BE EXPENDED 

A telegram which practically assures 
the erection of a handsome Episcopal 
church in Gary," "was received here 
"Wednesday from New York. It stated 
that $10,000 had been awarded by the 
church authorities in that city for the 
Gary edifice. The telegram also said 
that the purchase price of the lots re- 
served for the church at the corner of 
Fifth avenue and Adams street, had 
been cared for by an "unknown 
friend." It was currently surmised 
that this "unknown friend" was J. 
Pierpont Morgan, who is an ardent 
Episcopalian. Judge E. H. Gary re- 
cently made a gift on his own account 
of a site for the church of the Metho- 
dist denomination, of which he has 
been a lifelong member. 

"The liberal gifts from New York," 
said a member of tlie church yesterday, 
"means that we will be able to build 
an edifice costing from $30,000 to $35,- 
000. The corner selected by the church 
authorities is one of the best and most 
accessible in the city, and a handsome 
structui'e there would be a great orna- 
ment. We have been hoping for some 
time that these donations might be 
made, but the positive announcement 
by telegraph is most satisfactory to 
us." 



HOAV WOULD IT BE TO LIVE IN GARY? 



97 



BIG AUDIENCE HEARS READ. 



The Great American Story Teller Roy- 
ally Entertains in the Masonic 
Social Club Course. 

The Opie Eead lecture given at As- 
sembly hall Thursday night under the 
auspices of the Masonic Social club, 
was unquestionably the most success- 
ful entertainment that has been given 
here. Mr. Read being widely known 
as one of the most entertaining speak- 
ers, tickets sold early, and at 8 o'clock 
the hall was filled. 

Mr. Read was introduced at 8 :15 
by H. J. Carr, after which he talked 
for an hour, his subject being, "First 
One Thing and Then Another." "I 
have chosen this name for my talk," 
said Mr. Read, "so that I will be sure 
not to get off the subject." 

Mr. Read's lecture was of the great- 
est interest to every person in the audi- 
ence. Bright humorous sketches as 
Avell as stories of pathos were used to 
illustrate the points that he brought 
out. 



Report of the Condition of the 

FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF GARY 

In the State of Indiana. 

At the close of business, Nov. 27, 1908. 

RESOURCES. 

Loans and discounts .$144,714.37 

Overdrafts, secured and un- 
secured 296.23 

U. S. Bonds to secure circu- 
lation 30,000.00 

Premiums on Lf. S. bonds. . . 1,400.00 

Bonds, securities, etc 500.00 

Banking house furniture 

and fixtures 41,952.54 

Due from National Banks 

(not resei've agents) 29,714.21 

Due from State Banks and 
bankers 14,227.60 



Due from approved reserve 

agents 25,391.19 

Checks and other cash items 5,756.17 
Exchanges for clearing 

house 3,964.26 

Notes of other National 

Banks 13,500.00 

Fractional paper currency, 

nickels and cents 791.08 

Lawful Money Reserve in Bank Viz: 

Specie $ 8,945.00 

Legal-tender notes 10,000.00 

$ 18,945.00 

Redemption fund with U. S. 

Treasurer (5 per cent, of 

circulation) 1,500.00 

Total $332,652.65 

LIABILITIES. 

Capital stock paid in $100,000.00 

Surplus fund 1,000.00 

Undivided profits, less ex- 
penses and taxes paid . . . 2,574.60 

National Bank notes out- 
standing 29,500.00 

Due to Trust Companies and 

Savings Banks 18,627.89 

Individual deposits subject 

to check 170,123.01 

Demand certificates of de- 
posit 3,296.00 

Certified cheeks 225.48 

Cashier's checks outstand- 
ing 7,305.67 

Total $332,652.65 



Report of the Condition of the 
GARY STATE BANK, 

A STATE BANK AT GARY, 
In the State of Indiana. 

At the close of business on Nov. 27, 
1908. 

RESOURCES. 

Loans and discounts $ 71,094.28 

Overdrafts 507.34 



98 



'IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909" 



Other bonds and securities. 75,000.00 

Banking house 47,543.51 

Furniture and fixtures 3,345.81 

Due from banks and trust 

companies 50,831.18 

Cash on hand 28,740.03 

Cash items 3,001.44 

Current expenses 8,972.59 

Interest paid 197.58 

Total resources $289,233.76 

LIABILITIES 

Capital stock paid in $100,000.00 

Demand deposits $134,677.10 
Demand certiti- 

cates 2,545.85 

137,222.95 

Time deposits . . 39,316.24 

Time certificates 400.00 

39,716.24 

Certified checks 59.91 

Cashier's checlvs 333.00 

Due to banks and trust com- 
panies 3,304.56 

Exchange, discounts, etc... 8,597.10 



RECORD OF SOME REAL ESTATE 

TRANSFERS IN AND ABOUT 

GARY APRIL 17, 1909. 



Tolleston, It 11, b 15, Co's 4th 

add $ 500 

Gary, It 30, b 1, 2d Grant Park 

add 450 

Township 35, .806 acre in 9, 35, 

9 250 

Township, 36, 100x139 feet in s w 

1/4 32, 36, 7 1,500 

Tolleston, It 8, b 14, Co's 5th add 700 
Gary, It 6, b 58, original town. . . 3,500 
Gary, It 6, b 10, Broadway add. . 450 
Tolleston, Its 32 and 33, b 11, Lo- 
gan Park add 600 

Gary, It 13, b 4, Broadway add. .1,000 
Tolleston, It 18, b 4, Pridmore, Orr 
& Ulrich's sub (sec 10) 1,900 



Township 37, 42.25 acres in s % 
21, 37, 9 '!' 1 

Township 37, 32, 11 acres in ni^, 
21, 39, 9 1 

Township 37, 16.099 acres in n w 
1/4, 21, 37, 9 1 

Township 37, 40 acres in n e i/4 20, 
and n w % 21, 37, 9 1 

Gary, Its 13, 15 and 17, b 78, origi- 
nal town 2,250 

Tolleston, Its 19 and 20, b 19, Co's 
3d add. and It 17, b 1, It 23, b 
17, Co's oth add 1,850 

Tolleston, Its 14 and 15, b 1, Co's 
5th add 2,050 

Township 33, 75 acres in 9, 33, 7 . 4,875 

Township 36, 35 acres in 29, 36, 7 930 

Tolleston, Its 36 and 37, b 7, Lo- 
gan Park add 400 

ToAvnship 36, 10 acres in 29, 36, 
9 1,250 

Gary, It 5, b 34, original town. . . 800 

Gary, It 7, b 81, original town. . . 625 

Tolleston, Its S and 9, Caldwell's 
2d add 400 

Gary, It 28, b 8, original town. . . 700 

Gary, Its 26 and 27, b 2, Gary 
Park ad 600 

Toleston, It 6, b 6, 2d Logan Park 
add 300 

Township 37, pt s w % 25, 37, 10, 
southwest of L. N. A. & C. Ry., 
and north of Calumet River . . 5,000 

Township 35, 120 acres in 2, 35, 8 1,150 

Township 35, 38 acres in 16 and 
21, 35, 7 3,400 

Tolleston, 60 lots in Red Oak add 2,220 

Tolleston, It 14, b 12, Logan Park 
add 300 

Township 36, 184x255 f t in s e 14, 
s e 14, 29, 36, 7 1,975 

Tolleston, It 7, b 4, Oak Park add 425 

Township 36, 7.27 acres in 18, 
and 3 acres in 19, 36, 9 1,200 

Gary, Its 14 and 26, b 10, Broad- 
way add 2,000 

Tolleston, Its 3 an 4, b 1, Carl- 
son's 1st add 700 

Gary, It 30, b 59, original town. . 2,160 



HOW WOULD IT BE TO LIVE IN GARY? 



Gary. Us 16 and 17, b 83, original 

town 4,000 

Township 34. SO acres in 16, 34, 
7 6,000 

Township 34. 6.16 acres in w 1/2, 

n w 14, 9, 34, 8 1,000 



PLATE MILLS COMING NEXT 



Contract for the Machinery Just 

Awarded by the Indiana 

Steel Company. 

The contract for the plate mill at 
the Gary plant has just been awarded 
by the Indiana Steel Company. It will 
be what is known as "the sixty-inch 
uniYcrsal plate mill." 

The total capacity of the plate mill 
will be 75,000 tons of finished product 
a year. Plates of all sizes up to sixty 
inches in width and of all thicknesses 
will be produced. 

The decision to go ahead with the 
construction of the plate mill is but 
another indication of the diversified 
products of the Gary mills when they 
are fully completed. 

Foundations Going In. 

The entire western half of the mill 
site is now being allotted to the var- 
ious mills for the manufacture of steel 
for general use. The foundations are 
already going in for the merchant mill 
and for the billet mill. Before the win- 
ter sets in the great concrete founda- 
tions for the plate mill and car axle 
mill will be in place ready for the su- 
perstructure of steel and brick during 
the winter. 



FIRST CHRISTMAS EVE. 

On Christmas eve, 1906, one of the 
most notable gatherings that has ever 
taken place here, was held in one of 
the little school houses that stood on 



Broadway just south of the Lake Shore 
tracks, the only schools in Gary at 
that time. 

It Avas the first Christmas tree in 
Gary, and the celebration that was ar- 
ranged was attended by practically ev- 
ery English-speaking resident of Gary. 
It was the first and probably the last 
time that the entire population of the 
town was gathered under one roof on 
such an occasion. 

The school house was decorated with 
evergreen branches, and lighted with 
candles, while two large Christmas 
trees, chopped but a short distance 
from Broadway were loaded with 
candy and fruit for all of the school 
children. The treat was bought by a 
subscription fund taken by the teach- 
ers of the school and the amount was 
large enough so that each pupil re- 
ceived a generous supply of candy. 

Only Organ in the Town. 

A program had been arranged by 
the teachers and recitations were giv- 
en before an audience that packed ev- 
ery corner of the room. When the en- 
tertainment was over, the little 
folding organ, the only musical 
instrument in the town, wheezed 
out the accompaniment to "America," 
and the volume of sound that arose 
from the entire population of the town 
bore as much meaning as the anthems 
sung by the Pilgrims. Like the 
Pilgrims, the Gary people had 
found new homes and the hard- 
ships attending the establishment of 
the homes only added to the energy 
with which they worked. It is doubt- 
ful if such genuine good cheer will 
ever again be known in Gary. 

Christmas day was set aside for a 
complete holiday, and nearly every one 
remained in the town. The business 
at the police station on that day was 
great. Christmas morning found the 
cells full of revelers of the night be- 
fore, waiting anxiously to see how they 



loo 



"IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909" 



were to be punished. Judge Fitzger- 
ald arrived at the jail early in the 
morning, and one by one the men were 
dismissed, even when their petty 
crimes were evident. It was their 
Christmas present. 

Great Change in a Year. 

In the winter of 1907, things had 
changed materially. More than 500 
residences had been erected and there 
was ample room for Christmas cheer. 
Numerous stores on Broadway offered 
attractive Christmas presents and ho- 
tels and restaurants flaunted irresis- 
table bills of fare. 

On this Christmas the men who 
founded the city can si^urcely believe 
that it was only two years ago when 
there were no houses, no Christmas 
windows, and Santa Claus had not yet 
found the j'oung city hidden in the 
dunes. 



TOLLESTON NOW LIGHTED. 



NEW BANK TO BEGIN BUSINESS 

ON BROADWAY NEAR SIXTH 

AVE. IN DECEMBER, 



Prominent Men in Project — Frank A. 
Vanderlip, Vice-President of Na- 
tional City Bank, New York, 
Interested. 

The Calumet Trust and Savings 
bank is the title of a new banking in- 
stitution which will open its doors at 
656 Broadway during December. 

Among the incorporators of the new 
bank are Frank A. Vanderlip, vice- 
president of the National City Bank, of 
New York, the largest banking insti- 
tion in the United States. 



The electric light line to ToUeston 
has been completed and lights are now 
being furnished to the town by the 
Gary Heat, Light and Water Company. 
All of the lamps have not yet been 
placed on the poles. 



FIRST IRON ORE HERE 

BY APRIL 25 



Two New Company Steamers. 

II, is now planned for the first 1909 
cargo of iron ore to reach Gary about 
April 25. 

The Pittsburg Steamship Company, 
the lake transportation end of the 
United States Steel Corporation, has 
been given instructions to deliver at 
Gary during the coming season a mini- 
mum of 2,000,000 tons of iron ore and 
a maximum of 2,500,000. 

Two steamers of the largest class 
have been added to the steel corpora- 
tion's fleet during the winter and will 
trade here regularly. They are known 
as the E. J. Buffington and the Alva 
Dinkey. 



INCORPORATE THE GARY CLUB 



Formal Steps Taken for a Social and 
Family Organization. 

The Gary Club has been incorporat- 
ed and application will be made for 
the lots set aside by the Gary Land 
Company at the northeast corner of 
Sixth avenue and Adams street for 
club purposes. It is the ultimate aim 
of the club to erect a handsome club- 
house on the site selected, with ample 
grounds for athletic sports on the lots 
originally reserved by the Land com- 
pany for that purpose. 



HOW WOULD IT BE TO LIVE IN GARY? 



101 



FINISH SURVEY IN TWO WEEKS 



American Bridge Engineers Securing 

Topographical Data — Plant Will 

Have Four Units. 

Civil engineers now engaged in sur- 
veying tlie site of tlie American Bridge 
works near tlie Kirlv switclr yard re- 
port tliat tlieir work will be accom- 
plished within the course of two weeks. 
Tliey will tlien return to Pittsburg. 

The survey in Gary has been made 
for tlie purpose of determining the 
topography of the site. The site is 
three-fourths of a mile in length and 
over 1,S00 feet in width. The exact 
data will be returned to the company 
so that the engineers in charge of the 
preparation of the site for building 
purposes may know every fill and ev- 
ery cut that is to be made. 

Four Units in Gary. 

The American Bridge Company, it 
was stated by the engineer in cliarge 
of the survey in Gary, would erect 
four units in Gary. Each of these 
units will employ 1,000 men, the total 
number of men employed in the oper- 
ation of the mills being in the neigli- 
borhood of 5,000. In addition to this 
number there will be clerical and 
draughting forces consisting of nearly 
four hundred men. The company will 
of course have its offices here. 

The American Bridge Company does 
not manufacture its own steel but is 
supplied that by the United States 
Steel Corporation. The steel bars, 
sheets and rods will be assembled by 
the plant at Gary and here made into 
structural shapes for use in the con- 
struction of bridges. 



MICHIGAN CENTRAL TO BUILD 



on the structure will begin at once. 
The building will be of brick, and will 
be located on the east side of Broad- 
way, on the north side of the Michi- 
gan Central tracks. 



COMMON STOCK TO ITS MEN 



Steel Corporation Makes Decided 

Change in Its Profit Sharing 

System, 

A new departure in the profit-shar- 
ing plan, giving its employes the privi- 
lege of subscribing to the common as 
well as the preferred stock of the con- 
cern, has been announced by the Unit- 
ed States Steel Cori^oration. Tlie price 
at which the stock is being offered to 
the employes is $110 a share for the 
preferred and $50 a share for the com- 
mon. The closing prices for these se- 
curities on the stock margin today 
were 113 and 52 respectively. 

The price at which the preferred 
stock is offered to employes this year 
is the highest since the profit-sharing 
plan was started. Last year the em- 
ployes were allowed to subscribe to 
the preferred stock at $87.50 a share. 
The total subscription amounted to 
about 60,000 shares, but only about 
25,000 shares were allotted. 

Since the profit-sharing plan was in- 
troduced in 1903 the employes who 
purchased stock have received in divi- 
dends and bonuses close to $12,000,000. 



LINCOLN SERVICES AT CHURCHES 



Plans for the new passenger station 
of the Michigan Central railroad have 
practically been completed, and work 



Large Audiences Attend Memorial Ex- 
ercises Sunday. 

Large audiences attended the Lin- 
coln memorial services at the Congre- 
gational and Presbyterian churches 
Sunday evening. At both churches 
special programs of patriotic songs and 



102 



"IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909' 



other music were arranged and both 
Reverend Sullens of the Congregation- 
al church and Reverend Walton of the 
Presbyterian church delivered sermons 
in memory of Lincoln. 

Further services will be held in mem- 
ory of Lincoln this week by the schools 
and some of the other Gary churches. 



HOLLAND GETS THE TRUTH 

"De Telegraaf Van Dorderdad" De- 
votes Two Columns to Descrip- 
tion of Gary. 

In the i.ssue of August 13, of "De 
Telegraaf van Dorderdad," a Holland 
publication, two columns are devoted 
to a description of the new steel city, 
Gary. 

The article is a cable message from 
Cleveland and is an accurate descrip- 
tion of Gary and shows that the cor- 
respondent had a great fund of cor- 
rect information about the city. 



LIBRARY SHOWS A GREAT GAIN 



Total of 2692 Volumes. 

One of the most remarkable in- 
stances of progress and gain in popular 
favor among local institutions is that 
of the Gary Public library, which has 
been in existence since October 1, 1908. 
The report of the Librarian for the 
month of February, which has just 
been issued, shows there are now regis- 
tered on the records of the library the 
names of 486 adiilt readers and 434 
juvenile readers making a total of 920 
active patrons of the institution. 



CONTRACT AWARDED FOR 

FIRE STATION AT TOLLESTON 

The Tolleston board of trustees on 
Monday awarded the contract for the 



construction of the new fire station to 
Albert Koepke. 

The station will be located at the 
corner of Grace avenue and Second 
street and will be completed by Feb- 
I'uary 1. 



WORK ON HOSPITAL 

EXCAVATIONS BEGINS 



Tuesday the work of making exca- 
vations for the construction of the 
new $250,000 hospital for the United 
States Steel Corporation at Broadway 
and the Grand Calumet River, was 
started. 



A FINE EDIFICE FOR METHODISTS 



To Cost $40,000 Complete— Building 
Will Be of Gothic Design— Con- 
struction to Begin This 
Summer. 

Plans for the new IMethodist church, 
to be erected at the southwest corner 
of Adams street and Seventh avenue, 
have now been decided upon definite- 
ly. A meeting of the trustees of the 
church was held Tuesday night, but 
no important changes were made in 
tlie designs already agreed upon. 

The church complete will cost $40,- 
000. It will have a seating capacity 
when completed of between 1,000 and 
1,100. 



Charles II. Slack, formerly a prom- 
inent grocer of Chicago, was in Gary 
Friday looking over the prospects for 
the establishment of a grocery on 
Broadway. Mr. Slack expects to make 
several trips to Gary before arriving 
at a decision. 



HOW WOULD IT BE TO LIVE IN GARY? 



103 



HOSPITAL UP TO FIRST STORY. 



Rapid progress is being made on the 
construction of the big $250,000 hos- 
pital for the steel corporation at the 
Grand Calumet river and Broadway. 
The work is now being done on the 
first story of the building, which will 
be completed this week. All the win- 
dow frames have been set in place and 
the structure is beginning to take def- 
inite shape. 



JEFFERSON PARK 

TO BE IMPROVED 



Power Station and Water Tower to be 

Ornamental Features — Big Thing 

for West Side. 

Improving and beautifying Jefferson 
Park to make it a most attractive place 
are about to begin. By September 
Gary will have on the west side a park 
which will be a fine setting to that 
residence section of the city. 

Will Be Left Undulating. 

No attempt will be made to fill in 
all the northern part of the park to 
the street level along Sixth avenue. In- 
stead, the surface of the park will be 
left undulating, only enough filling in 
the north end of the park being done 
to improve the appearance around the 
pumping station and to give the whole 
an attractive, park-like appearance. 

Of course, no planting of trees and 
shrubs can be done this summer. The 
entire park will be put in shape for 
the planting of trees and shrubs late 
next fall. 

Great Improvement to West Side. 

There is nothing which will improve 
the appearance of the west side more 
than the beautifying of Jefferson Park, 
which is right in the center of that 
residence section. This doubtless would 



have been done before, but the delay 
in the completion of the power station 
has put off the work until now. In a 
month more the power station will be 
wholly completed, and by that time the 
work of filling in the southern end of 
the park and the grading of the north 
part will have progressed to a point 
where the landscape gardeners can 
take up the corner devoted to the 
poAver station. 



JUDGE E. H. GARY MAKES MUNIF- 
ICENT GIFT TO CITY NAMED 
IN HIS HONOR. 



One of the Finest Edifices of Its Class 

in the State to Be Built This 

Summer. 

Judge E. H. Gary will present to the 
city named in his honor a Young Men's 
Christian Association building which 
will be erected at a cost of $100,000. 
This sum Judge Gary gives outright 
for the building and is exclusive of 
the land upon which it will be erected. 

Plans for the structure will be im- 
mediately rushed to completion by the 
architect of the Young Men's Chris- 
tian Association in New York, and as 
soon thereafter as contracts can be let 
actual construction will begin. 



NEWS OF STEEL WORLD. 



The stock of the United States Steel 
Corporation Wednesday reached the 
top-notch prices attained since the cor- 
poration was organized, some ten years 
ago. The advance in prices has been 
steady for a month, sometimes a frac- 
tion up, but always upward. 

The top figures Wednesday were 
reached at 3 o'clock, the close of trad- 
ing on the New York Stock Exchange. 

The remarkable advance in steel 



104 



IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909" 



stocks is the cause of much good feel- 
ing among the employes of the corpo- 
ration, -vvho purchased their stock at 
much lower prices than have prevailed 
this year. In 1907, employes paid 87 
for preferred. This year they paid 110. 
Those that selected common stock for 
their purchases this year paid 50. 



NOW AND NOT DECADES HENCE, 



Gary has certainly fared Avell in the 
way of generous gifts from the world 
at large. Perhaps never before in Indi- 
ana, if not in the United States, has a 
new city, not yet quite three years old, 
fared so well. All of the denomina- 
tions have extended a helping hand in 
the establishing of their churches in 
the Magic City of Steel. In some in- 
stances the donations from the general 



church organization have been sur- 
prisingly large and the church edifices 
already erected or to be erected before 
the end of the year would do credit to 
a city far larger than Gary. 

Most cities have to wait for a Y. M. 
C. A. building until, tlirovigh laborious 
years, funds can be raised among their 
citizens. In Gary a complete Y. M. 
C. A. building, the building, land, and 
equipment costing not less than $175,- 
000, will be given out of hand. 

Two great hospitals will be com- 
pleted in Gary before the end of the 
year 1909. Both structures in their 
architecture and equipment will be un- 
excelled in any city of the Union with 
a population of 50,000. It has come to 
pass that Gary will have in its earliest 
years what ordinarily would have been 
acquired only after decades had passed, 
all through the generosity of those Avho 
have faith in the city's future great- 
ness. 



THE PERMANENT AND INCREASING GREATNESS OF GARY 105 



THE PERMANENT AND INCREAS- 
ING GREATNESS OP GARY 

is as certain as that of the United 
States government. Two factors only 
are needed for any reasonable man's 
convincing; first, the continued de- 
mand for the United States Steel Com- 
pany's, varied products, and second 
their equipment for a continuance of 
the production. 

The demand is multiplying every 
decade. In every city in the land are 
being built towering sky-scrapers of 
steel construction. For instance in the 
new city hall in Chicago the steel re- 
quired will weigh two thousand tons. 
There are five-fold more large iron 
bridges built each succeeding decade, 
and the railroad extension and re- 
equipment is beyond comijrehension. 

James J. Hill, the wonderful head of 
the Great Northern System, in a re- 
cent letter to the governor of Minne- 
sota, declared that "the building of 
15,000 miles of additional railroad 
trackage every year for the next five 
years, at an annual cost of over one 
thousand one hundred million dollars, 
is absolutely necessary." 

This will require two million tons of 
steel rails every year, which is nearly 
two-thirds of the production of all of 
the rolling mills in the United States, 
and of course, its supply will devolve 
largely upon the great Economical 
plant at Gary. 

The United States Steel Corpora- 
tion owns as much land as is comprised 
in the three states of Massachusetts, 
Vermont and Rhode Island. 

It employes one hundred and eighty 
thousand workmen. 

More than one million persons (which 
equals the population of Nebraska and 
Connecticut), depend upon it for their 
living. 

It paid out in wages last year one 
hundred and twenty-eight million dol- 
lars, which is more than the United 



States government paid for its army 
and navy. 

It owns railroad tracks which would 
extend from New York to Galveston, 
Texas. 

It owns thirty thousand cars and sev- 
en hundred locomotives. 

It has ninety-three blast furnaces 
which run night and day, and fifty 
great iron mines with ore enough to 
last one hundred years. 

It makes more steel than Great Brit- 
ain and Germany. 

It burns ten million tons of coal a 
year, eleven millions tons of coke, and 
fifteen billion cubic feet of natural gas. 

Its supply of fuel will last sixty 
years. 

It paid four hundred million dollars 
for the great ore beds on the shores of 
Lake Superior. 

Steel Rails Already. 

To those of us who have been in 
touch with Gary from the start, the 
following from a Gary paper of May 
5, 1909 seems a dream. Never has so 
great a thing arrived at results so 
quickly ! 

Loading Steel Rails Here. 

The Sharpies, which wintered at 
Kingston, brought a cargo of paving 
stone from Alexandria Bay in the St. 
Lawrence river. She is loading 2,000 
tons of steel rails here for delivery to 
the Great Northern railway at Duluth. 
This is the third cargo shipped from 
the Gary mills this spring. 



READY TO BEGIN 

MERCHANT MILLS 



New Era of Construction to Provide a 

"Widely Diversified Output 

at Hand. 

(Written in August, 1908.) 

Tlie important announcement has 
come from the Indiana Steel Com- 



106 



"IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909' 



pany that the construction of the 
great mills for the manufacture of 
merchant steel and iron will begin at 
once. This work will be pushed vigor- 
ously, which means that there will be 
no lessening of the army of construc- 
tion during the coming year. 

The wide stretch now vacant between 
the rail mill aud the billet mill and 
the western fence is to be filled up by 
the immense structures where steel and 
iron is to be converted into the finished 
product. Among these structures will 
be one where car axles will be made, 
itself a most important industry. In 
another building structural steel will 
be produced. All kinds of steel bars 
for the general trade will come from 
still another building. 

For many months the engineering 
corps of the Indiana Steel Company 
has been at work preparing the plans 
for one of the most complete merchant 
mills in the United States, if not in 
the world. These plans have been so 
far completed that it will not be long 
before construction begins by building 
acres of concrete foundations. 

To Fill Western Part. 

"When these buildings have been 
completed, the western part of the 
plant will be as well filled with struc- 
tures as the eastern half, where the 
blast and open hearth furnaces are 
now located. 

Althoiigh the army of construction 
has been engaged now over twenty-six 
months in building the Gary mills and 
a portion of them is about ready for 
operation, a comparison with what has 
already been accomplished with what 
is yet to be done makes it evident that 
only a fair start has been made. This 
army of constriietion, now four thou- 
sand strong, has at least two more years 
of work before the mills approach any- 
thing like completion, and even then 
it will be two years more before the 



ultimate plans of the Steel Corporation 
take concrete form in buildings and 
machinery. 

To Push Ore Docks South. 

The iron ore docks have been com- 
pleted up as far as the first set of fur- 
naces, but they must be pushed farther 
south at once to front the second batch 
of furnaces now under way. One open 
hearth is now practically ready for 
operation and a second one is well 
along, but the foundations are not yet 
fully completed for the third and have 
just been commenced for the fourth. 
There are two more open hearth build- 
ings, on which nothing has as yet been 
done. The rail mill is ready for opera- 
tion. In fact, the sections of the mills 
which will be given over to the making 
of steel rails is further along than any 
other part, and it is likely that the 
manufacture of steel rails will begin 
the coming winter. Good progress has 
also been made on the billet mill, but 
all that important part of the plant 
which will be devoted to the manufac- 
ture of iron and steel in diversified 
forms for the general trade has yet got 
no further than the completed plans 
which are now ready to be passed over 
to the commanders of the army of con- 
struction. 

To Light Furnaces When Possible. 

It can be stated on authority that 
fires will be lighted in the blast fur- 
naces for the making of pig iron the 
earliest day that they can be got ready. 
Every effort is being bent to push that 
day forward as far as possible, but as 
yet no officials of the Steel Company 
will make their predictions as to how 
soon this will be. As soon after as the 
open hearth furnaces are in shape to 
begin the making of steel, the pig iron 
will travel from the blast furnaces to 
the open hearth, and as soon after that 
as the rail aud billet mills are ready to 



THE PERMANENT AND INCREASING GREATNESS OF GARY 107 



begin turning- out the finished product 
they will be added onto the chain. 

More Work than Ever Before. 

In the meantime the amount of con- 
struction under way Avill ecj[ual if not 
considerably exceed that of last fall, 
winter and early spring. 

In other words, the force to operate 
the first section of the plant will come 
in on top of the army of construction. 
There is likely to be five thousand in 
the operating force. Added to the con- 
struction forces, this will mean that 
nine thousand men employed in the 
steel mills must be housed somewhere 
the coming winter. 



THE FIRST GARY PIG IRON 

(December, 1908.) 



The first pig iron to be made in Gary 
was turned into the molds of the pig 
machines at the southeast corner of 
the mills Tuesday. The pig machines, 
which will be recognized by passengers 
who take the Lake Shore trains as the 
large building to the northeast of the 
station, have been ready for about a 
month. 

First Furnace Satisfactory. 

The first furnace, which was lighted 
Monday forenoon, has operated to the 
great satisfaction of the officials of the 
Indiana Steel Company. After a twenty- 
four-hour run nothing had occurred in 
the operation of the new furnace which 
had not been anticipated. There were 
a few minor leaks, some slight, insig- 
nificant explosions as the gas found its 
way for the first time through the 
great pipes. There was nothing seri- 
ous enough, however, to be called a 
mishap and the furnace was doing its 
work well. 

It will take from four to six days to 
get gas enough to run one of the gas 
engines in the electric power station. 
In the meantime the blowers are being 



operated by a steam turbine engine. 
As soon as there is a sufficient quan- 
tity of gas to make the tests of the gas 
engines, that final link in the making 
of steel at the Gary mills will begin to 
be welded. 

A Week Before the Next One. 

It will be a week or ten days before 
the next or second furnace is lighted. 
The two furnaces will then work in 
pairs until the time comes to start the 
open hearths and the rail mill. 

The second pair of furnaces is now 
practically ready to be operated, but 
the fires in them will not be lighted 
until the open hearths and the rail 
mills begin operations. 

The production of pig iron noAV un- 
der way is not for the purpose of hav- 
ing pig iron, but to get the gas Avhich 
is generated in its production. In other 
words, the furnaces are being operated 
to secure a by-product rather than 
what is ordinarily the more important 
output. When the mills are in full 
operation, there will be no pig iron 
made except Saturday nights and Sun- 
days. All the metal will continue hot 
from the time it leaves the furnaces 
until it comes out as finished product 
from the rail or billet mills. 

Most Delicate Work Ahead. 

The work ahead of the construction 
department now is perhaps the most 
delicate that the forces of construction 
have encountered since ground was 
broken thirty months ago. In the elec- 
trical power station are the great gas 
engines stretching for a quarter of a 
mile, which must be gotten into work- 
ing order before the open hearths and 
the rail mill can begin. These gas en- 
gines are among the largest ever con- 
structed. They are connected directly 
with electrical generators, and alto- 
gether they make the greatest display 
of resistless power as one glances in 
either direction from the balconies that 



108 



'IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909" 



has ever been seen. But not one of 
them has yet been tested. They have 
been installed with great care, of 
course, and the electrical generators 
have been built up alongside. Nothing 
more can be done until the gas with 
which they are to be operated can be 
supplied. 

Tryout to Begin Soon. 

As soon as the two furnaces produce 
a sufficient quantity of gas to be stored 
in the great gas-holder which stands 
between the furnaces and the electrical 
power station, the tryouts of the big 
gas engines will begin. It is expected 
that the engines and the electrical gen- 
erators will be found to work satisfac- 
torily, as the greatest care has been 
taken in their installation, but no 
doubt changes will have to be made 
here and there. Some minor things 
will be found out of order and will 
have to be replaced. 

It is for this reason that the steel 
officials decline to make even a guess 
as to when the open hearths and the 
rail mill will begin operations. Both 
have been completed and are practi- 
cally ready for the turning on of the 
electric power. There are a few little 
things yet to be done, of course, for 
the officials have known that there 
would be considerable delay at the 
electrical power station and have taken 
their time in piitting on the finishing 
touches at the open hearth and the 
rail mill. 

Second Pair of Furnaces Ready. 

The second pair of furnaces are in 
the same shape as the open hearth and 
the rail mill. They are practically fin- 
ished, but will not be started until the 
manufacture of steel begins. 

The second furnace will be operated 
solely because it is necessary to have 
a pair of furnaces worldng together in 
order to get a steady supply of gas. 
The supply of gas, of course, runs up 



and down with each furnace, but when 
the two are operated together the ups 
and downs offset each other and a 
comparatively steady supply of gas 
for use in the gas engines will be 
secured. 

1,000 Tons of Pig Iron Daily. 

The furnace already in operation 
will make from 450 to 500 tons of pig 
iron per day. As yet it is not produc- 
ing to its full capacity, and it may take 
a week before it reaches its maximum 
output. The pair will tiirn out about 
1,000 tons a day. All of this pig iron 
will have to be stored for use later on 
after the open hearths begin operations 
in making steel. 

In the operation of the furnaces 
from 200 to 400 men, working in shifts 
of twelve hovirs eaeli, are required for 
eacli furnace. The variation in num- 
ber is due to the amount of handling 
required for the product. It is ex- 
pected that until the open hearths and 
the rail mills begin, the furnaces will 
furnish employment to between 700 
and 800 men. 

Recruited from Many Points. 

The force at work at the furnaces 
has been recruited from many points 
and the skilled men were selected with 
great care and are a picked force. 



OPPOSITION HAS NOT HARMED. 



Tlae Standard Oil Company has been 
given the reputation of crushing its 
small competitors. The United States 
Steel Corporation, through all the years, 
has kept itself free from this charge. 
But in the fall of the year 1908 what 
are now spoken of as the independent 
companies, aggregating quite a large 
steel production, entered upon a united 
eifort to get more orders. This was 
probably due to a depression in the 
steel trade resulting from the sudden 



OPPOSITION HAS NOT HARMED 



109 



and decisive slump in business condi- 
tions in October, 1907. The Steel Cor- 
poration promptly met this movement 
by necessary cuts in their selling 
prices, which in many things, and for 
a number of months, were so material 
as to cause a widespread impression 
throughout the United States that the 
Steel Company's former immense earn- 
ings might neA^er be realized again. 
The market value of both their com- 
mon and preferred stock decreased. It 
is now evident that this decrease was 
from the same causes that decreased 
values in everything else, and not from 
competition by the Independent Com- 
panies. 

Within the last week the quarterly 
statements of the Steel Corporation to 
March 31, 1909, have become public, 
and sliow that for the first quarter of 
this year the net earnings were much 
larger than any of the numerous un- 
official estimates liad indicated, being 
$22,921,268 as compared with $18,229,- 
000 in the corresponding quarter of 
the year 1908. They also show un- 
filled orders on the books calling for 
3,542,591 tons of material as compared 
with orders for 3,603,527 tons on Dec. 
31, 1908, and 3,765,343 tons on March 
31, 1908. It is said that in addition to 
the orders on hand on March 31, 1909, 
the April bookings were not only very 
large, but that tliese orders are "live" 
ones, that is, for immediate shipment, 
whereas in the preceding quarter, 
while contracts were made, buyers 
were in no hurry to have them filled 
and many of them stood on the books 
for weeks Mdtiiout a ton being turned 
out against them in the mills. 

The earnings for the last quarter as 
above, are significant when we remem- 
ber that the principal official cut in 
selling prices was made in February 
of this year. 

The usual dividends were declared, 
and stock market quotations show 
that few stocks have rallied so favor- 



ably from the general depressed prices 
of both common and preferred as in 
the case of the Steel Company. 

The Chicago Examiner of May 2, 
1909, in speaking of any probable effect 
of the tariff elianges on tlie Steel Cor- 
poration's ijrosperity, says: 

"An official of the trust has boasted 
that with the Gary jjlant steel can be 
made $5 cheaper than by any competi- 
tor, thus placing the trust beyond fear 
of competition or of tariff reform. The 
report of $22,900,000 earned for the 
first quarter of tliis year was more than 
a million greater than anybody expect- 
ed. But of greater significance than 
this was the volume of orders on hand. 

In January orders disappeared en- 
tirely when the cut in prices was made 
and they came in volume only after 
the public understood that the bottom 
had been reached. Orders have been 
hurried by the announcement of an in- 
crease in prices by the trust and by 
several leading independents in the 
past weelv. " 

Of course all talk of $5.00 per ton 
is unreasonable. Two dollars a ton dis- 
advantage would paralyze any steel 
mill. 



A SUGGESTION FOR 

CHICAGO FRIENDS 



We are at an age of impatience with 
having our home life confined to the 
strenuous city. Except during the 
winter season, Ave long for a comfort- 
able rural home, however humble. The 
rich are )neeting this desire with ex- 
pensive country houses erected on acres 
of possibly slowly increasing value. 
Their children may not want them, 
and great depreciation in the value of 
the buildings will be evident Avhen a 
sale must be made. 

Why should not you and I select and 
purchase now, a tew or many acres, 
not in Gary, but in the Gary region, 



no 



"IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909' 



and get the benefit as we grow older, 
of the sure great increase in value of 
the land, and in the meantime enjoy 
onr summers on it in a modest but 
comfort bungalow, for which I have 
200 architect's plans, to which you are 
welcome ? 

There are many areas of desirable 
properties for such a move. There are 
plenty of trees; soil that is good, or 
can be made good, scores of paved 
roads being built, quiet, respectable 
rural neighbors, feasible deliveries of 
food supplies, fuel, ice, etc. ; nearby 
stores, churches, physicians, mail de- 
liveries, telegraph and telephones, 
and such splendid steam and electric 
transportation to Chicago (much of it 
on fifty minute trains) that we could 
attend to our Chicago business daily. 

I would like to take this up prompt- 
ly with some of my friends, as the 
ground should be purchased now, even 
though not used until next spring. 



GARY'S HARBOR 

IS NOT EXCELLED. 



HOW IRON ORE 

WILL BE RECEIVED. 



Human Labor Largely Eliminated in 

Taking Cargoes from Ships and 

in Feeding the Furnaces. 

(Written in 1908.) 

In many important Avays the harbor 
at Gary Avill stand in the front ranks 
of the harbors of the world. In the 
rapid handling of iron ore, which, of 
course, will be the chief commodity of 
the new harbor, it will be without a 
rival anywhere. Every device known 
to man which tends to save time and 
labor will be installed on the water 
front. Most harbors have grown up 
from small beginnings, and plans for 
their development have had to be made 
to meet existing conditions. In Gary 



the plans were made first. The result 
will be to give a harbor of unequaled 
facilities, with no limit on labor-saving 
appliances. 

Straight into the sand dunes a chan- 
nel is being dredged 250 feet wide and 
25 feet deep. For a mile this channel 
or harbor will be lined Avith concrete 
docks on the side toward the mills. 
This solid wall of concrete rises ten 
feet above the water line. 

For Railroad Tracks. 

The dock is 62 feet wide. Tracks are 
laid on each side of the dock on which 
the vessel-unloading machines will 
travel. Between these great tracks 
four railroad lines will be constructed. 
The purpose of the railroad lines is to 
enable the vessel-unloaders to drop 
their burdens directly into railroad 
cars when ore is to be shipped from 
the docks to Joliet and otlier points. 

Next to the unloading dock are the 
receiving bins for iron ore to be used 
in the furnaces. These reservoirs are 
divided by heavy concrete walls 87 
feet apart. When the mills are fully 
completed the reservoirs will extend 
nearly a mile in length. With the 
present construction, they will have a 
capacity of about one million tons, 
which will be ample to supply the mills 
with iron ore for the five months dui-- 
ing the winter and early spring, wheu 
)ake navigation is closed by ice. This 
capacity will be more than doubled 
when the mills have been entirely com- 
pleted. 

Gigantic Ore Bridges. 

Tracks are laid on the top of the 
concrete walls of the reservoirs, and 
over these tracks will run the great 
Hoover & Mason bridges, which will 
be used to carry the ore from the place 
where it is dropped by the vessel-un- 
loaders to the bins where it is pre- 
pared for the furnaces. These iron on; 
bridges are the largest ever constructed 



GARY'S HARBOR IS NOT EXCELLED 



111 



in the world. They rise 85 feet above 
the floor of the reservoirs and are 497 
feet long. The clam-shell appliances 
with which the bridges are equipped 
will scoop np and carry away fourteen 
tons of iron ore at every trip. 

Aiter the ore has been carried to the 
bins it will be dropped into the Brown 
hoisting bins alongside the furnaces. 
More railroad tracks will be located 
at this point for the transfer cars to 
carry the ore direct to the furnaces. 
The cars are used on account of the 
fact that it is easier to move them than 
to move the great bridges. From the 
ears the ore is shot into elevators and 
talcen to the top of the furnaces, ready 
for use. The bins are built double, 
with one part for iron ore and one 
part for coke. 

Not Touched by Hands. 

From the time the steamer with its 
10,000 or 12,000 tons of iron ore reaches 
the harbor, no human hand touches the 
iron ore in moving it. The clam-shell 
of the vessel-unloader is dropped into 
the hold of the ship and automatically 
seizes its load of ten tons, which it 
swings around and drops into the res- 
ervoir or into the waiting cars. It 
takes less than one minute for the ves- 
sel-unloader to seize its great load, 
drop it, and be back in position to 
take the next. 

The great clam-shell grab of the 
bridge drops under the pile of iron ore, 
where it has been left by the vessel- 
unloader, seizes in its capacious grasp 
14 tons, lifts its load from 50 to 75 
feet into the air, and carries it a tenth 
of a mile toward the furnaces as rap- 
idly as the human eye can move. There 
the ore is dropped into cars or into 
bins, as the case may be, and from 
there the ore is again moved without 
the touch of a shovel on its rapid prog- 
ress toAvard the mouth of the furnace. 

Does the Work of Hundreds. 

In his little house on the vessel- 



unloader one man does the work of a 
hundred under the old way of han- 
dling iron ore with shovel and hoist. 
In another little house, far up in the 
air on the bridge, another man, by 
the simple turning on of a current of 
electricity, performs the labors of hun- 
dreds more Avith their shovels and 
AvheelbarroAvs. The labors of another 
hundred are saved by the automatic 
unloading of the cars Avhich transport 
the ore to the furnace elevators. Every- 
Avhere it is electricity which furnishes 
the power to move these great quan- 
tities of ore at lightning speed from 
the holds of ships to the gaping mouth 
of the furnace. This power is no in- 
significant item, for the easy SAvinging 
of a load of fourteen tons high in the air 
for 500 feet, takes not only immense 
poAver, but unlimited strength. One 
of the A'essel-unloaders has been com- 
pleted and noAv sits at the sea Avail 
like a battleship, ready for the coming 
fray. The first of the bridges has also 
been completed. Four more unloaders 
and four more bridges Avill be placed 
on the Avater front before the first ship 
arrives Avith iron ore next summer. 
Part of the steel for their construction 
is already on the ground and the rest 
is due Avithin a short time. This equip- 
ment is but half of what will be placed 
on the sea Avall AA'hen the full plans of 
the steel mills are carried out. 

Fastest in the World. 

The results obtained in the rapid 
handling of iron ore are Avithout prec- 
edent in the Avorkl. Ships carrying 
from 10,000 to 12,000 tons can be un- 
loaded on the Avater front between sun- 
rise and sundoAA'n. At the iron ore 
shipping ports these same ships can be 
loaded in from three to six hours. But 
a little over a Avorking day on each 
round trip of 2,000 miles Avill be taken 
up Avith the handling of cargoes. The 
story of cheap lake transportation is 
told in the labor-saving devices on the 



112 



IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909' 



Gary docks. It is because ships can 
load and unload their cargoes so 
quickly that iron ore can be carried 
1,000 miles at 80 cents per ton, or less 
than it could be handled by teams 
across town. 

Spectacular Sights. 

While the vessel-unloaders and the 
bridges will be the great, spectacular 
sights on the water front, the great 
iron ore reservoirs will attract much 
attention from visitors to the mills. 
Their walls of concrete are from five 
to eight feet in thickness. They have 
concrete floors eighteen inches thick, 
five feet above the lake level. When 
fully completed these reservoirs will 
extend along the harbor for nearly a 
mile. It is said that nowhere else in 
the world has it been possible to secure 
such unlimited storage for raw mate- 
rial at any of the great steel plants. 
There will be millions of tons of iron 
ore within easy reach of the gigantic 
grab which drops down from the 
bridges. There will be no extra hand- 
ling, and not a single item to increase 
the cost of production from the time 
the iron ore is dropped into the holds 
of ships on Lake Superior until the 
steel comes out as a finished product. 



SOMETHING NEW EVERY WEEK 



The reader must not expect this book 
to remain up to date, even until it 
reaches him. Gary, even in the large- 
ness of its things, develops swiftly. The 
writer has tried to avoid mention of 
things that are "going to be." 

On February 1st of this year an an- 
nouncement came from Pittsburg that 



the Steel Company had abandoned its 
work on additional coke ovens in 
Pennsylvania, which were to have 
been built at the cost of .$3,000,000 and 
that in their stead an enormous by- 
product eolving plant was to be estab- 
lished in Gary. The project abandoned 
included 700 ovens at Filbert, 500 
ovens at Ralph and 500 ovens at Sar- 
ah, Penn. 

And now, as these pages are about 
completed, comes the announcement 
of the beginning, at once, of the con- 
struction at Gary of 560 by-product 
ovens as the first section of the enor- 
mous coking plant there contemplated. 
The site is just east of, and adjoining, 
the new turning basin, the east side 
of which is to be converted into docks 
for the unloading of steamers bringing 
coal from the Lake Brie ports, the 
turning basin to be enlarged and thus 
becoming an important part of the 
harbor. 

Between 6,000 and 7,000 tons of coal 
must be handled every twenty-four 
hours with the first lot of ovens to be 
built. Enough gas will be manufac- 
tured in the coke ovens to supply Chi- 
cago and many other towns in Illinois 
and Indiana, but of course its consump- 
tion will be throughout the local field. 
The plant will effect a great saving in 
the cost of making coke which will be 
put on the market as fuel in competi- 
tion with coal, and in as much as coke 
is a smokeless fuel, it Avill have much 
to do with preventing the smoke nuis- 
ance in Gary. 

By-product ovens have been in suc- 
cessful operation in Germany many 
years and experiments with them in 
the United States in the last five years 
have proven remunerative. 



FOR THE PESSIMIST 



113 



A FEW PAGES FOR 

THE PESSIMIST 



SomeA\'here between the beginning 
and end of this volume the pessimistic 
reader's faith may balk and he will 
think : " It 's too much even for this 
age. It cannot keep up this marvelous 
pace. A slump is coming. Something 
adverse must happen about now in 
this great enterprise." Let sueh a 
reader consider the following: 

FIRST— TITE STEEL COMPANY'S 
CONSTRUCTION WORK AT GARY 
IS ONLY FAIRLY UNDER WAY. 
It will not be many weeks now before 
the mills will end the period of tests 
and get down to work on the first 
orders on the books. These orders call 
for about 100.000 tons of open hearth 
steel rails of the most approved stand- 
ard, and it is expected that deliveries 
will begin on them early this spring. 

By the time this book reaches its 
readers the fourth of the blast fur- 
naces will be lighted. It is now ready 
for the match. 

Most Remarkable Period of Develop- 
ment. 

Then will begin a most remarkable 
period of development. 

In the operation of the mills, close to 
5,000 men will be reqiiired. But at the 
same time that operation begins, the 
army of construction, at least 5,000 
strong, will return to the mills. While 
a vast amount of work has already 
been done to get the mills to a point 
where steel rails can be made, the con- 
struction has but fairly started. It has 
been kept up to some extent during 
the wiuter, but the forces have not 
been as large as a year ago, because it 
was found that the best results were 
not obtained by laying concrete in cold 
weather. 

The full force is now returning. 
Four more furnaces, pushed along as 
far as possible last fall, are to be 



rushed to completion. The great billet 
mill, now only inclosed, is to be made 
ready for operation. 

A Square Mile to be Covered. 

All the merchant mills on the west 
side of the plant extending to the west 
fence, nearly a square mile in area, are 
to be built and ec^uipped. 

While all this is being done, the 
foundations of the third and fourth 
bunches of furnaces and the third and 
fourth open hearth buildings must go 
in, and the superstructures, like great 
exposition buildings, must go up. 

One-Third Completed. 

It is a fair statement that the con- 
struction already covered by appro- 
priations from the United States Steel 
Corporation and for which the funds 
have been set aside is not one-third 
completed. 

By the most conservative estimates 
of the Steel Company's officials, at 
least 10,000 men will be employed in 
the plant by early summer. 

At the American Car and Foundry 
Company's site, engineers have been 
at work all winter, preparing to begin 
building operations in the spring. The 
entire tract must be graded and the 
Grand Calumet river must be straight- 
ened at that point before actual con- 
struction commences, but a consider- 
able force will be recjuired from the 
outset in preparing the site. 

The engineers of the American Loco- 
motive works have also been over the 
site for its great plant east of the city, 
and the architects and construction en- 
gineers are now formulating plans. 

Ready to Begin Construction. 

It is said that the American Bridge 
Company, subsidiary of the United 
States Steel corijoration, is ready to 
begin construction. 

The coke plant has progressed to a 
point where the engineers of the steel 



114 



'IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909" 



corporation are now preparing the 
plans. This work, -in itself a big nn- 
dertaking. is well along. 

Many Small Manufacturing Plants. 

At least half a dozen smaller con- 
cerns, which will supply the big plants, 
have been allotted sites, and will be- 
gin construction as soon as the build- 
ings of the American Car and Foun- 
dry and the American Locomotive 
works begin to take shape. These 
smaller concerns would be considered a 
rich prize by ordinary cities, but here 
they are simply lost sight of in the 
grand whirl of industrial development. 

But it is in the city itself that the 
most feverish activity will be shown 
this year. The rush to build homes has 
already commenced. At least 300 
houses and flats are now under con- 
struction within the city limits. 

Three Big Public Structures. 

Bids have been taken from contract- 
ors for three extensive public struc- 
tures. Perhaps first among them is 
the Union passenger station of the 
Lake Shore and the Baltimore & Ohio 
at Broadway. This structure is the 
most elaborate passenger station on 



either road between their terminals, 
and will cost about $200,000. Bids 
were received at Baltimore some 
weeks ago, seventeen of the principal 
construction companies of the United 
States competing. The award would 
have been made before this and the 
building commenced, but for the sud- 
den death of Chief Engineer Crouth- 
ers of the Baltimore & Ohio. 

Half a Million in Company's Hospital. 

The plans for the hospital which the 
United States Steel Corporation will 
build for its employes in Gary, are now 
in the hands of contractors, and bids 
will be opened in a few days and the 
contract closed. It is estimated by one 
of the leading Gary contractors, who 
has put in his bid, that the cost of 
building outside of steel and one or 
two other items, which the steel cor- 
poration reserves for itself, will be 
about $ 200,000. 

The big stretch of sand between the 
elevated railways and the Grand Cal- 
umet river for half a mile will be con- 
verted into park grounds for the hos- 
pital. The total cost of the building 
and grounds is placed at $.500,000. 




GARY'S NEW CITY HALL. 



FOR THE PESSIMIST 



115 



City Hall Soon to Go Up. 

Bids will soon be opened for the new 
City Hall at Massachusetts street and 
Seventh avenue. This building will 
cost about $50,000. 

Electric Line to Be Built. 

In tlie way of electric roads, the line 
froin Valparaiso and Hobart will be 
built this season, at least between Gary 
and Hobart. 

Crown Point capitalists are moving 
heaven and earth, so to speak, to get 
their line twelve miles long, built in 
the spring. Public sentiment runs so 
high in Crown Point that local capital 
will not wait for the promoters any 
longer, but will eo ahead on then- own 
account, as they have kept the fran- 
chise in the control of the citizens' 
committee. 



doiibtless be built on schedule time. It 
comes into Gary a.t Fifteenth avenue. 
The Gary & Interurban now also in 
the grip of the Shonts group, is obli- 
gated bj' its franchise to build its 
Fifth avenue line this year. This is 
about two miles long. In addition to 
these electric lines, there is another 
planning to get into Gary from Whit- 
ing. It has obtained franchises in 
AVhiting and East Chicago. 

Gary & Western Ready. 

The right-of-way of the Gary & 
.Western is completed, ready for trains 
as soon as the New York Central lines 
decide to begin running them. It is 
given out that the Gary & Western 
service will start in May at the latest. 

In addition to all these improve- 
ments requiring an army of men, all 
.the streets in the first subdivision are 




THE PJNZEN'HOF REST.VURANT— PUBLIC HALL ON THE SECOND FL( 



Still Another Interurban. 

The New York and Chicago Electric 
Air Line has annoanced its intention 
of reaching Gary by midsummer. 
Since the Shonts group of financiers 
got hold of the road, there is ample 
capital back of it, and the line will 



to be paved and sidewalks laid in the 
spring. The work is now only about 
half done. On the south side, outside 
of the Steel Corporation's property, 
and in ToUeston, there will be a great 
rush in the building of houses and the 
improvement of streets. Many public 
improvements have been ordered by 



US 



"IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN '1909" 



the trustees of both Gary and ToUes- 
ton. 

At Least 20,000 Men At Work. 

By Midsuranier next there will be at 
least 20,000 men employed in Gary. 
This is not an offhand estimate, but is 
the result of careful estimates by offi- 
cials and by the contractors who will 
do the work. 

The above and other large matters 
are mainly for the present year. For 
each of the following years there will 
be as much or more. The American 
Steel & Wire Company,, being a subor- 
dinate company of the United States 
Steel ComiDany, makes it almost certain 
that their contemplated immense plant 
will be built next year, by which time 
there will also have been completed 
such large works as the Plate Mill and 
other similar adjuncts of the steel 
works. 

SECOND— THF: incoming OF 
INDEPENDENT P^ACTORIES, IN 
AND ABOUT GARY, IS BARELY 
STARTED AND WILL CONTINUE 
FOR YEARS. 

The significance of this is far frora 
trifling. 

The American Car and Foundry 
Company, first of the great manufac- 
turing concerns of the country not al- 
lied with the United States Steel Cor- 
poration to locate in Gary, will start 
immediately on the construction of its 
plant west of the city. 

The Gary works of the American Car 
and Foundry Company, when com- 
pleted, will turn out 200 cars a day and 
will employ from 8,000 to 12,000 men. 
The building of this great plant is not 
only a great boom to Gary, but the 
town 01 ToUeston, which lies directly 
south of its site, will be largely bene- 
fited. 

The engineers' surveys of the ground 
and the plans for the buildings and 
machinery were filed away, ready for 
future use. Payments were made to 



the Gary Land Company for the 160 
acres of land which had been contract- 
ed for. This land lies just south of 
the Baltimore & Ohio right-of-way 
west of the Grand Calumet. It is a tri- 
angular strip with the Grand Calumet 
at its south-eastern boundary. In ad- 
dition to the 160 acres originally pur- 
chased, the American Car and Found- 
dry company, on the advice of its en- 
gineers, selected 52 acres more in or- 
der to complete the site. This gives 
the company 212 acres all of which 
will be occupied by buildings and sid- 
ings. 

Before the end of the week the en- 
gineers will be back on the ground 
making their final surveys. There is a 
great deal of work to be done in lev- 
eling off the tract which is covered 
with small sand dunes before actual 
construction can be commenced. It is 
expected that before the end of the 
year the company will be ready to let 
the contract for the grading. 

A Great Corporation. 

Tlie American Car and Foundry 
Company is one of the great aggrega- 
tions of capital in close touch with, but 
not subsidiary to, the United States 
Steel Corporation. It is capitalized at 
$60,000,000. It has plants now at De- 
troit, Jefl'ersonville, Chicago, St. Louis 
and a dozen other points and builds 
the larger portion of the cars in use on 
American railroads. The Gary plant 
will excel in size any of those now in 
operation. 

The Car Axle Plant. 

It was to supply the American Car 
and P'oundry Company with car axles 
that the Steel Company added to its 
mills a department to turn out steel 
car axles. This industry has hitherto 
been largely supplied from Pittsburg, 
and the Gary car axle plant is the first 
large institution of its kind in the 
west. Although but a part of the In- 



FOR THE PESSIMIST 



117 



diana Steel Company the ear axle cle- 
partmeut is in itself a large industry 
and one which would be welcomed to 
any of the smaller cities as being an 
event worthy of a big celebration. 

In preparing the ground for the 
American Car and Foundry Company 
a new channel will be dug for the 
Grand Calumet river, which, instead 
of winding through the lowlands will 
be straightened and deepened at the 
southern boundary of the car manu- 
facturing plant. 

American Locomotive Works. 

The recent location of the American 
Locomotive works in Gary is the most 
important event in the history of the 
"Magic City of Steel" since the com- 
ing of the American Car and Foundry 
Company. 

It can no longer be said that Gary 
is but a one-company town. Besides 
the United States Steel Corporation, 
with its great subsidiary companies, 
there will be the American Car and 
Foundry Company, the largest manu- 
facturer of steel cars in the world, and 
the American Locomotive works, which 
builds more locomotives than any other 
company in America. 

Both the American Car and Foundry 
Company and the American Locomo- 
tive works are outside the Steel Cor- 
poration. They have selected Gary as 
sites for their new plants on account 
of its unexcelled transportation, and 
also to the advantage of having their 
plants in proximity to the source of 
raw material at the Gary steel mills. 

The location of the American Loco- 
motive works is particularly fortu- 
nate, for in the building of locomotives 
the large majority of the men are high- 
priced, skilled Avorkmen. There is but 
a fraction of common labor in such 
plants. 

The announcements made in the 
newspapers from the office of the com- 
pany in New York state that from 12,- 



000 to 15,000 men will be employed in 
the new works. These figures are 
based on the ultimate plans of the 
company and may not be reached for 
tM'o or three years. The first unit of 
the plant, the construction of which 
will begin immediately, will employ 
at least 4,000 men. Of these, at least 
3,000 will be highly-skilled mechanics. 

To property-owners in the present 
business center of Gary the location of 
the locomotive works to the eastward 
is an admirable balance to the Amer- 
ican Car and Foundry on the west. It 
assures for all time the maintenance of 
Broadway in its present standing as 
the business center of Gary. 

The Economist magazine of Chicago 
must have had inside information of 
the coming of the American Locomo- 
tive works when it announced that 
"engagements already entered into 
contemplate the employment of 75,000 
men and a population of 250,000 in the 
near future." This statement was tak- 
en as perhaps too roseate a forecast 
when it was made, but the figures are 
now rapidly approaching it. 

The Annual Report of the United 
States Steel Corporation 

at the beginning of this year states, 
among other things, that "At the close 
of the year, there was unexpended on 
appropriations authorized for construc- 
tion and improvement at Gary, $22,- 
500,000." Of the former appropria- 
tion of $50,000,000, there was an un- 
pended Dec. 31, 1908, balance of $7,- 
202,770.43. This sum, according to the 
understanding of the officials of the 
Indiana Steel Company is in addition 
to the $22,500,000 reported above. 

What Was Expended in Previous 
Years. 

During the first year of Gary the 
corporation expended $19,316,555.27 
and during the second year $18,848,- 
472.19. 



118 



"IF I HAD^KNOWN ABOUT GARY IN 1909" 



The estimated expenditures for 1909 
are slightly less than for either of the 
first two years, but the expenditures 
for those years included large sums for 
real eslate, and did not represent as 
much money paid for actual construc- 
tion as it is now estimated will be paid 
during the current year. 

THIRD— Many VERY LARGE 
THINGS IN GARY'S GREAT FU- 
TURE ARE AS YET RARELY 
TITOUGI-IT OF OR SPOKEN ABOUT. 
If you will asli any old resident of 
Chicago he will tell you that the one 
great thing of early force in Chicago's 
growth and greatness, was what we 
now call the old Illinois and Michigan 
Canal, the then outlet (now inlet) of 
wliich was at the Chicago point on 
Lake Michigan. 

The livest large topic of national de- 
velopment now before the Amei-ican 
people is the coming great Water Way 
from Lake Michigan to the Gulf of 
Mexico and from thence through the 
Panama Canal to the Orient. It is mor- 
ally certain that the Lake Michigan in- 
let to this great water way, or at least 
one of two such inlets, will be through 
the bed of the Grand Calumet River at 
Gary, and the writer predicts among 
other great things (now rarely spoken 
of in Gary's great future) that it will 
be the principal Port on all the Great 
Lakes. 

For years there has been continued 
friction between what are called the 
rural representatives in the New York 
state legislature and representatives of 
the interests of New York City. The 



same condition has for a long time ex- 
isted between those representing the 
City of Chicago and representatives of 
the rest of the State of Illinois. It will 
require wise thinking and some lines 
of policy hardly to be expected, if this 
conflict does not soon come into exist- 
ence in Indiana. Gary is fast becom- 
ing the great city of Indiana. Already 
there is in New York State a forceful 
agitation and contention for the set- 
ting apart of New York City and its 
surroundings as a new state. The 
writer prophesies that the present gen- 
eration will see a new state formed of 
the northern part of Illinois, including 
Chicago, and the northern part of In- 
diana, and will see Chicago and Gary 
one city, extending from Waukegan to 
Michigan City. 

Chicago is now probably the great- 
est manufacturing city in the world. 
The writer has reason for believing 
that its manufactures lead the world, 
not only in the aggregate of value in 
dollars, but in quantity by carloads. 

When to this wonderful third city of 
the world is added the coming hun- 
dreds of thousands along the southern 
shore of Lake Michigan, forming the 
world's center for the great Iron and 
Steel Industry with the unparalleled 
development of municipal conditions, 
attractiveness as a place of residence, 
any many, many times multiplied 
values of its real estate, thousands who 
have not read this little volume will 
say: 

"IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT GARY 
IN 1909." 



"Dont's. 



>> 



Do not arrive at Gary exiDecting the privilege of going through the immense 
mills, unless j^ou have: 

1st. A permit, which can only be obtained in Chicago. 

2nd. A strong pair of legs with high shoes for tramping perhaps a half day 
through the sand. 

Do not write to me about obtaining at Gary employment or a business open- 
ing, as I am neither informed nor situated to answer such letters. 

Do not write me for maps, etc., as the map in this volume is the only one I 
could send. It is one of the best and latest. 

Do not write asking as to the character or standing of any real estate operator 
at Gary or the quality or value of his'property. 

Do not write to me at Gary or expect to meet me there except bj' appoint- 
ment, and if by appointment let it be definite as to the minute and place, and keep 
it promptly. I am on the go about half the time keeping posted on Gary. Unless 
we are personally acquainted, it is better to call on me in Chicago briefly at first, 
arrange for an}^ desired advice and make appointment for an hour or a day later. 
Such an appointment, however, can be arranged by mail. If you bring or send 
a friend, have him read this book before coming — it will save time and talk. 

Do not take a dancing lesson on a vacant lot nor buy or talk real estate on a 
street or sidewalk. If a real estate man cannot arrange to first see you in his 
office, you can do without him. 

Do not seem foolish and say: "If that man's real estate is worth what he 
asks for it, he would not sell it for that," and do not continue foolish and say: "If 
that man will give me my price for my Gary land, it must be worth more and I 
will not sell it." That kind of reasoning would stop all buying and selling, except 
in necessaries. Take a fair profit and let the buyer also make something. 

Do not be inconsistent, and say: "That land the owner offers for $1,000 an 
acre only cost him -1600 an acre a year ago, hence I won't buy it," when you know 
very well that if the value and price of the land was not increasing you would not 
think of buying it. 

Do not disclose paresis b)^ asserting that the Steel Company is expending 
a hundred million dollars at Gary in order to sell some thousands of dollars worth 
of land. 



Three Stories. 



Mr. Brown came to Chicago, where he knew no one, to buy an automobile, 
about which he knew nothing. On his arrival at Chicago, he felt favored in fall- 
ing in with a stranger on the street who "could tell him all about all of the different 
kinds of automobiles," and took him to one salesroom and kept him away from all 
others, and his purchase had so much "fat" in it for several people, he never could 
have sold his machine, even new, for within $500 of what he paid for it. 







Mr. Smith went to Chicago for the same purpose, under the same conditions, 
except that he did not fall in with the street friend. He visited fifteen salesrooms, 
saw sixty different kinds of automobiles, and talked for hours on a subject he did 
not understand, with scores of men he did not know. He heard so many bad things 
at each place about the fourteen other places and their machines, that he became 
discouraged and went home without buying. 







Mr. Jones also went to the city on the same errand, but un his arrival in Chicago 
before talking with any automobile people, he went to a man who knew a great 
deal about automobiles and did not represent an}' of them. He had satisfied him- 
self that this man was both posted and honorable, and then told him he wanted 
an hour of his time, information and advice and was willing to pay ten dollars for 
it, to which the man agreed. At the end of their talk the man informed Jones that 
it was quite feasible and customary for him to go with Jones to several of the sales- 
places, and, while fairly and honorably helping Jones to a right selection and a 
low price, to get from the sales department, a part of the commission on the sale. 

This pleased Jones very much, as he wanted still more of the man's time and 
advice, so for several days they together looked over the subject and Jones made 
his purchase at a reduced price and the man not only received from the company 
pay for his time, but returned to Jones what he received for his first interview. 
Jones bought the same kind and size of automobile that Brown bought, but for a 
thousand dollars less than Brown paid. 



iUN 10 iao9 



,Piil-l!ii-ili 




